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.