A sequel of revulsion to the new logo of the Big Apple, variant with the us of the globally beloved I, reads like this: “The rats (heart) New York”. They love him, no doubt.

What is happening? Rarely has there been such unanimity among citizens in the radical rejection of an idea that seeks to motivate people and recover the pride of a city punished by the impact of covid.

Love New York and hate the redesigned emblem. There is a saying, “what ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, which rings true in this matter.

The networks were filled with disqualifications. “This is literally the worst design I’ve ever seen in my life,” reads an Instagram post. “It’s bad”, according to a message on Twitter.

“The original seems to be the voice of the city. The new one looks like the voice of a bank or a health care provider”, he is disqualified in another tweet.

The campaign is led by the so-called Partnership of New York, a consortium of companies and executive heads that has the support of the authorities, including the governor of the state, Kathy Hochul, or the mayor of the city, Eric Adams.

Before all this furious tide of rejection, even indignation, was fired, Matthew Quint already anticipated this reaction in statements to The New York Times. Quint, director of the Center for Global Brand Leadership at Columbia University’s Business School, explains in a telephone conversation that his omen seemed like an easy prediction.

“Reviving the passion among those who live in New York is very commendable and makes a lot of sense”, he emphasizes. “But it is inevitable that the effort to adjust one of the most famous logos in the entire world will generate criticism. People love the original and have it embedded in their minds,” he insists.

“The new logo lacks the bite and snarl that made what Milton Glaser had created an icon,” writes Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker.

Not only does the we change to the I. The font has also been modified (it now imitates the subway signs) and the C has been added to NY, which specifies that it is the city.

This nuance causes the same nausea in New Yorkers as a spoonful of castor oil.

The legendary Glaser, who died in 2020, sketched his logo with a pencil on the back of an envelope while traveling in a taxi. He actually married it for a New York State tourism promotion campaign, which still owns it.

But the residents of the city appropriated it, made it their own. See now the abbreviation NYC, used in official records and, sometimes, in the mail “is not natural to New Yorkers and does not generate the sensitive vibrations of a synecdoche”, remarks Gopnik.

Everything responds to the eagerness of authorities and economic and social sectors (companies, non-profit organizations, churches…) to combat installed pessimism.

In a recent survey, 67% said the city is going in the wrong direction, but 70% of those aged between 18 and 40 said they were willing to help improve it.

“This city overcame the darkest days of covid thanks to the selfless work of ordinary New Yorkers”, praised the mayor in the presentation of the redesigned logo and the campaign to invite residents to continue collaborating in the reconstruction of the urban spirit

The era of the pandemic brought apocalyptic visions for New York. The same obituary from other occasions was dusted off again. And, as then, it seems premature, as Mark Twain would say. The impact, however, has been strong. There are consequences in the city and in the self-love of its neighbors.

Stijn van Nieuwerburgh, a professor at Columbia University’s School of Business, coined the expression doom loop (fatal loop) to define that depressing feeling when walking through the center of a semi-empty Manhattan, among garbage, rats and the homeless abandoned to their fate, which is none.

Remote work has caused the loss of real estate value of offices. Many wage earners no longer come to the city to do the work or do so only partially. Mondays and Fridays are wasteland. These employees spend $12 billion less a year on area businesses (restaurants, bars, hair salons, clothing stores) and revenue from municipal coffers has fallen by $5 billion, making this a loss of services, while the crime rate rises.

“So this is a train wreck in slow motion; the second shoe hasn’t dropped yet”, said Van Nieuwerburgh to the Times at the beginning of this 2023.

The reply is given by Edward Glaeser, professor of Economics at Harvard University and author of an extensive research work on cities.

“There is a downward cycle, but it is not a fatal loop. The demand for New York remains robust”, explains Glaeser, also by phone, about the change to the badge of the metropolis where he grew up.

“I don’t have an opinion on the logo, it’s not my business”, he replies, but he clarifies that “there is certainly a need for New York to think about what it can do to rebuild itself and get people to go downtown”.

One of his recipes is based on the fact that, despite remote work, the labor pulse in the entire part of financial services will recover if the real estate price of the offices, very much nailed before the pandemic, comes to fall close to 50%.

He argues that New York has done very well for much of the past 40 years when compared to cities such as Philadelphia, Detroit, Cleveland and others on the West Coast.

But if you think from 2020, “if you put the data on employment growth, wages, the increase in the price of housing, in New York they are doing worse than in the cities of the Rust Belt” as a whole. Among the cities of the “rust belt” are the aforementioned Detroit or Cleveland, among many others in the so-called manufacturing country.

In his analysis, Glaeser considers that this setback is not far from the scope of the serious crisis of the seventies. “We’re in a recession, but it’s not a colossal existential threat like that,” he says.

Then the Bronx was burning. Today, he insists, murders are a fifth of what they were.

And the fame of a cover of the Daily News in 1975 that included a phrase from the then president of the United States still lives on. “Ford in the city: falls dead”, due to the inability to meet its debts.

The difference is that that New York ceased to be the great industrial power, something that will not return, while now it remains a gigantic tourist center and a magnet for immigrants or young graduates. “It’s still an exciting and fun city, and that’s not going away. It has survived many crashes and worse crashes than this,” says Glaeser.

A line of attack against the logo starts from the memory of the original author. “Miton Glaser curses from the grave”, says a tweet. “Glaser’s ghost is crying,” notes another.

Who recognizes that he does not know exactly whether the author of “I love NY” would have liked the new version or not.

“Maybe I would have chosen a different way to redesign it. I think, however, that he would have applauded the ethos, the distinctive spirit behind it as a brand to revive the pride of the city”, he specifies.

Nor does it observe absolute failure. “Even if the change in design is crowding out – he concludes -, it is managing to attract attention. It’s a preventive effort before things get really bad.”