A word of advice: Don’t mess with New Yorkers’ hearts.

Change the iconic “I Heart NY” logo? Fuggedaboutit!

A loud Bronx cheer could be heard in all five boroughs as soon as this new “We Heart NYC” logo was unveiled this week, as part of a campaign designed to promote the city coming back from the COVID pandemic.

This unwelcomed change to the iconic “I Heart NY logo” has broken many a New Yorker’s own.

Who tampers with a Milton Glaser design, anyway?

I love New York.  I hate the new logo.

The “I Heart NY” logo is so ubiquitous in New York that it feels hard to imagine a time it didn’t exist.

New York 1975

Craving diversity and excitement, I rushed headfirst into The Big Apple just at the time of its alleged downfall rampant with crime, arsons, and prostitution. Despite President Ford denying a struggling N.Y.C. any federal aid, in essence, telling the city to “Drop Dead, it was anything but dying to me. What others saw as a near-death experience for the city, nourished me in ways I crave. Photo Mayor Abe Beame 1975

The fact is, when I moved to the city in 1975 it didn’t.

I may have loved New York but New York City was far from lovable.

It was dangerous and dirty, and drug use was rampant. Vandalism was incessant and looking over your shoulder was a way of life. Graffiti-covered subways were overcrowded, unreliable, and filled with beggars, flashers, and chain snatchers.

A close-to-bankrupt N.Y.C. seemed beyond redemption. The media consistently showed a city plummeting. Movies like Taxi Driver, Death Wish, The French Connection, and Escape from New York, all served up a dangerous and gritty N.Y.

Even bucolic Central Park became synonymous with crime and muggings which became the punch line for too many Johnny Carson jokes about “Fun City.”

Part of “Fun City” were the countless storefronts that advertised live sex acts, X-rated 8mm films books, magazines, ,

The city had been in decline for years. After a comment in 1966 from incoming Mayor John V. Lindsey optimistically referring to N.Y. as “Fun City,” the phrase was used ironically by residents who were not impressed with the Mayor’s upbeat tone about a city that over the next four years would have a sanitation strike, teacher walkout, a crippling blackout, and financial woes.

By 1975 Fun City became Fear City.

From Fun City to Fear City

After Mayor Beame cut the police department due to the city being billions of dollars in debt the NYPD issued a pamphlet called “Welcome to Fear City: Survival Guide for Visitors to the City of N.Y.” The pamphlet  was distributed in June 1975

That summer, visitors coming to the Big Apple were not greeted by a plethora of paraphernalia proclaiming I Love NY  but with an ominous paper pamphlet entitled “Welcome to Fear City: A Survival Guide for Visitors to the City of New York.”

The pamphlets distributed by off-duty N.Y.C. policemen in airports, bus, and train stations, featured a hooded skull on the cover. It came with a blunt warning: “Until things change, stay away from New York City if you possibly can.”

Inside was a list of nine “guidelines” that if you were lucky might allow you to get out of the city alive, and leave with everything you came with.

The guidelines painted a nightmarish vision of New York. Visitors were advised not to venture outside of midtown Manhattan, not to take the subways under any circumstances, and not to walk outside anywhere after six in the evening.

And never even think of going to a decaying outer borough.

The pamphlet offered explicit instructions on how to navigate through the Big Apple – women were told to clutch their handbag close to their body using both hands, always hide everything in your car, engrave your possessions with special metallic pens, and never,ever trust your valuables to hotel vaults.

Vintage Guide To NYC Hotels 1972

Hotels were far from safe havens from the menacing streets.

“Hotel robberies have become virtually uncontrollable, and there have been some spectacular recent cases in which thieves have broken into hotel vaults.” Visitors should try “to avoid buildings that are not completely fireproof” and “to obtain a room that is close by the fire stairs.”

Tourists were getting scared off.

I, on the other hand, was falling in love with the city.

Before the iconic  3 letters and a red heart slogan he created, Glaser designed the iconic 1966 poster for Bob Dylan in 1966 that enduring symbol that hung in every baby boomer’s bedroom. Glaser loved NYC and helped found “New York” Magazine where he created many covers. Top Left is the Glaser poster teeing up the launch of “New York” Magazine in 1967

While visitors were petrified, I knew as an artist there was no other place I wanted to be. This was also the year I took an evening class at the School of Visual Arts before I became a full-time student.

The class was called “Design and Personality.”

The teacher Milton Glaser.

The man who would go on to design the I Love NY logo.

Coming to New Yorks’s Rescue

With tourists terrified, a near panic ensued.

Tourism was one of the city’s few remaining industries and a near-bankrupt city couldn’t afford to lose it. Something needed to be done to rescue the failing tourism businesses and counteract the dire image of the city.

Tourists had to fall in love with New York.

In 1977 William S. Doyle, Deputy Commissioner of the N.Y. State Department of Commerce hired ad agency Wells, Rich, and Greene to develop a marketing campaign for N.Y. State centering on the slogan I love New York.

Milton Glaser was recruited to design a promotional campaign for the city. After submitting one solution, Glaser had a better idea and scribbled the now-iconic “I NY” in red crayon while in a cab. It now is part of the collection in MOMA

Doyle also recruited graphic designer Milton Glaser to create a logo based on the ad campaign. Glaser first scribbled his “I Heart NY” design with a red crayon on a scrap paper riding in the back of a checker cab.

It doesn’t get more New York than that.

Graphic  Design giant Milton Glaser

Glaser expected the campaign to last only a couple of months and did the work pro bono.

While his most-famous design’s longevity and resonance over the years surprised him, he was proud of what it accomplished.

“What the city needed at that time was an affirmation, a restoration of the feeling that New York was an important place to be,” he said in 2018.

The design was a huge success. The I Love NY logo is one of the most recognizable logos in the world and one of the most beloved.

Now New Yorkers want to know, if it ain’t broke why fix it?

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2023. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Is rebranding Twitter as X a marketing mistake or might it be very intentional?

Is Musk marketing his brand X to his target audience the anti-woke, anti-cancel culture, stars and bars crowd?

On the other hand who wants to be known as Brand X?

Once upon a time, Brand X was always set up as the inferior brand to the named one in TV  commercials.

Brand X was once ubiquitous in advertising of the 1960s. If it were absolutely necessary to trumpet the superiority of one’s own product, it could always be compared with that scapegoat, Brand X.

Brand X in TV commercials was always the competing product that left tattletale grey, failed to keep a frothy head, or came apart at the seams when tugged by two circus-strong men. The advertising industry often ran into trouble with the Federal Trade Commission for doctoring Brand X to ensure foolproof inferiority.

Then in 1960 the inevitable happened: unable to resist the lure of all those free plugs, several firms marketed their own, on-the-level Brand X products.

There was Brand “X” Window Cleaner, an efficient, cleaner invented by former Eisenhower Bodyguard Harry Chafvin Jr., who set up his own Brand “X” Corp. to manufacture the paste and a Brand “X” polishing cloth.

Jumping on the X bandwagon there was  Brand “X” cigarettes, put out by three young Manhattan admen who founded Brand “X” Enterprises Inc. Brand “X” cigarettes were designed “for the man who is satisfied with nothing less than second best.” The president of Brand “X” Enterprises explained: “There are millions of people who don’t want to be first, who believe first place is too crowded. Our cigarette is for the man who, as a boy, dreamed of becoming Vice President.” Brand “X” Enterprises, Inc. was so confident of the audience appeal for the underdog market that it planned to put out a new detergent. Its name: WON’T.

Does Twitter want to be the brand that is thought of as less than its competitors?

Or thanks to Elon Musk, has that already happened?

If 2023 was the year of Barbie, inspiring grown women to dust off their old Barbie dolls in a pink wave of nostalgia – it took until now for the phenomenon to finally free me to confess a long-held childhood secret.

As a collector of mid-century toys its no surprise that dozens of Barbie Dolls in all configurations and vintages line my shelves and are carefully stored in boxes. But they were not a part of my childhood. They were all purchased by me as an adult. The truth is I never owned a brand-new Mattel Barbie Doll as a child.

It took until 2024 to finally reveal what shamed me for years. My childhood was filled with a bunch of Bogus Barbies.

Brand X

Never settle for less than a genuine Barbie. Booklet 1962

It always surprised me growing up that my mid-century mother so loyal to the consumer industrial complex of  General  Mills, General Motors, and Proctor and Gamble sometimes veered off into uncharted territory with the Brand X choice.

Mom never dared wash our clothes in “Wave” when only Tide would do or surprise us at breakfast with “Sparkle Flakes” in lieu of “Sugar Frosted” ones. That said, cookies could be compromised so a Keebler Pecan Sandy look-alike from the kitchen of A&P’s Anne Page often accompanied my after-school milk and cookies,

As a long-time enthusiast of Orbachs Department Store in N.Y.C. where knock-off Parisian fashion could be had for a song, she apparently applied the same fashion frugality to my fashion dolls.

When it came to some toys -off brand was okay. Somehow, she assumed  I’d never notice the difference in dolls, despite the hours I spent gorging on TV commercials. fine-tuning my baby boomer consumer sensibility. As the first generation to have products directly marketed to us from the cradle onward, we were surrounded by products created especially for us.

Didn’t we learn even before we were of school age that  “you could tell it’s Mattel, it’s swell?” Barbie commercials flooded children’s TV debuting on the Mickey Mouse Club in 1959. Along with learning how to spell M-I-C-K-E-Y we also learned B-A-R-B-I-E!

Accept No Imitation

Mitzi by Ideal a clone of Barbie

Mattel was very firm insisting “Don’t accept imitations. Only those dolls with the wrist tag identifying them as an authentic Barbie could be counted on.

But success breeds imitation. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, imitation also spelled a share of a huge profitable market.

As Barbie sales soared it didn’t take long for a slew of 11-inch teenage high-heeled fashion dolls that were clones of Barbie to appear.

So when Mom bought me a fashion doll Barbie look a like she thought I wouldn’t notice. Grateful for the gift, I pretended not to. So what if my Barbie look a like was really a Mitzi Doll made by Ideal. This 11.5 fashion doll with a ponytail was the spitting image of Barbie.

The doll always went by “Barbie” in my house never once calling her by her given name Mitzi. Careful to keep her fully clothed, I feared a friend would see the fake name stamped on her neck and not printed on the plastic tush like a real Barbie doll.

Babette made by Eegee Toys, Brooklyn

Soon I added Babs, Tammy, and fetching Babette made by Eegee, rounding out my bogus Barbie collection that was growing. I may have lacked for a genuine Barbie, but these Barbie wanna-bees filled my bedroom with their knockoff outfits.

Barbie in The Snow

Today my genuine Barbie sits on my authentic Underwood Typewriter

It took a snowstorm to change that.

I got my first real Barbie thanks to a winter blizzard in 1962.  Like a new shade of Revlon lipstick, she was christened by me as Barbie in the Snow.

As the January snow was slowly melting I spied a flesh arm poking up from a mound of snow. I dug deeper and there was a Barbie doll dressed in a lovely spring frock, one I recognized from the catalogue as Suburban Shopper a lovely striped number. A 100% cotton suntop dress. The Cartwheel straw hat with blue ribbons and fruit-filled tote bag was missing as was the pink telephone and white pumps. But the faux pearl necklace was intact.

A gen-u-ine don’t accept imitations Barbie dropped by some heartbroken neighborhood girl

I supposed I could have tacked a note “Missing Barbie” on the nearby telephone pole as neighbors did for a runaway dog or cat, but this was a finders-keeper situation. I felt for the poor little girl whose blue Plastic Barbie Doll case now lacked a key element. However, this little miss had not treated her Barbie well- the fashion doll’s blonde hair had been shorn drastically revealing a large hole in the head.

Mattel would be happy to know that their Barbie would be treated better in my own home, where she would join my collection of Barbie Knocks offs.

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2024. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.