New York: from love to hate with its new logo

A sequel to the rejection of the new logo of the Big Apple, a variant with the “we” of the globally esteemed “I”, reads as follows: “The rats (heart) New York”. They love her, no doubt.

What is happening? Rarely has there been so much citizen agreement in the radical rejection of an idea that seeks to motivate people and recover the pride of a city punished by the impact of the covid.

Love New York and hate the redesigned emblem. There is a saying, “what is not broken, do not repair it”, which is applicable in this matter.

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

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

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

“Rekindling the passion among those who live in New York is very laudable and makes a lot of sense,” he stresses. “But the effort to tweak one of the world’s most famous logos is bound to draw criticism. People love the original and have it built into their minds,” she insists.

“The new logo lacks the bite and snarl that made Milton Glaser’s iconic one,” writes Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker.

It doesn’t just change the we for the me. The font has also been modified (now it imitates the subway signs) and the C has been added to NY, which specifies that it is the city.

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

The legendary Glaser, who passed away in 2020, sketched his logo in pencil on the back of an envelope while riding in a taxi. He actually concocted it for a New York State tourism promotion campaign, which he still owns.

But the residents in the city appropriated it, made it their own. Look now for the NYC abbreviation, used on official records and sometimes in the mail, “is not natural to New Yorkers and doesn’t generate the sensitive vibes of a synecdoche,” Gopnik remarks.

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

In a recent survey, 67% responded that the city is headed in the wrong direction. But 70% of those between the ages of 18 and 40 said they were willing to help improve.

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

The time of the pandemic brought doomsday visions to 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-respect of its neighbors.

Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, a professor at the Columbia University Business School, coined the expression doom loop, fatal loop, to define that depressing feeling when walking through the center of a half-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 salaried workers no longer come to the city to do their work or do so only partially. Mondays and Fridays is wasteland. These employees spend 12,000 million dollars less per year in the businesses in the area (restaurants, bars, hairdressers, clothing stores) and the income of the municipal coffers has fallen 5,000 million, with what this supposes a loss of services, while the crime rate goes up.

“So this is a slow-motion train wreck, the second shoe hasn’t dropped yet,” Van Nieuwerburgh claimed in the Times earlier 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 continues to be robust, ”explains Glaeser, also by phone in the wake of the change in the hallmark of the metropolis in which he grew up.

“I have no opinion on the logo, it’s not my business,” he replies. But he qualifies that “there is certainly a need for New York to think about what it can do to rebuild itself and get people back downtown.”

One of his recipes is based on the fact that, despite remote work, the labor pulse in the entire financial services part will recover if the real estate price of offices, very steep before the pandemic, drops by around 50%. .

He argues that New York has done very well for most of the last 40 years compared to cities like Philadelphia, Detroit, Cleveland and others on the East Coast.

But if you think from 2020, “if you put the data on job growth, wages, house price increases, New York is doing worse than the Rust Belt cities” 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 even close to the magnitude of the serious crisis of the 1970s. “We’re in a recession, but it’s not a colossal existential threat like that,” he says.

So the Bronx was burning. Today, he insists, the murders are a fifth of what they used to be.

And the fame of a cover of the Daily News in 1975 in which the then president of the United States included a phrase still endures. “Ford to the city: Drop dead”, due to the inability to face his debts.

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

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

Quint admits that he doesn’t know exactly if 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 she would have applauded the ethos, the distinctive spirit behind it as a brand to revive the pride of the city, ”she specifies.

Nor does he see utter failure. “Although people hate the change in design – he concludes – it is managing to attract attention. It’s a preventative effort before things get too bad.”