Milton Glaser was born in NYC in 1929, attended the High School For Music and Art, got his undergrad from the Cooper Union in the East Village, co-founded and designed the logo for New York Magazine, and that of Brooklyn Brewery. And at 87, he still roams our streets like the thoroughly New York royalty he is because once upon a time he saved us from the trash heap of history.
In 1975, the largest city in the nation was on the brink of bankruptcy. Major corporations were leaving in droves, manufacturing had dried up, and container vessels had outgrown the docks of Manhattan. We had been a company town that made clothing, sugar, household products, appliances, and shipped and received from what had been the busiest port in the world for 120 years. None of that was true any longer.
The red-lining of minority neighborhoods like Harlem, Crown Heights, Bedford-Stuyvesant in the 1930s broiled over in racial tension and violence, slum lords sat in comfort in homes in Florida, absentee, as their properties crumbled to the ground in NYC. Entire blocks, in Manhattan mind you, had simply disappeared. Crime raged through the streets, and as a young boy, I recall the first ten minutes of every local newscast in the evening, before the first commercial, was a litany of the murder and violent crime that had ravaged lives just the night before.
President Ford initially refused federal aid to the unofficial capital of the United States of America. It is understandable. The city seemed beyond salvation. New York City very nearly ceased to be. Who knows where that trajectory may have led, except for the displacement of millions, and the dispersement of the greatest concentration of creativity and innovation the world has ever known.
One thing NYC still had in 1976 were its Mad Men, if you will. and none were better than Milton Glaser. In an effort revitalize the city merely through perception, not in accounts, not in bank vaults, not in rehabilitation of neighborhoods, but first in the minds of the watching world, Mr. Glaser took four characters and strung them in a line (yes, in a line at first): the capital letter I, followed by a red heart symbol, followed by the capital letters N and Y, while riding in the back seat of a moving taxi cab.
Originally conceived as a statewide effort to bring back businesses stretching from Buffalo to Brooklyn, it was also to be a short-lived ad campaign, a shot in the dark without much promise, and Mr. Glaser produced the work pro bono.
Formalized with black letters set in a rounded slab serif typeface called American Typewriter, eventually stacked into the cube we recognize today, and coupled with a catchy tune and showcasing in update after updated version current Broadway hits and their casts, the campaign somehow caught the imagination of a sleeping nation who finally saw potential where only years, months, perhaps a few weeks earlier, they had only seen decay.
The city divided itself up into smaller business improvement districts, neighborhood pride replaced an overburdened bureaucracy, Mayor David Dinkins doubled the size of the police force, and with Broadway still the golden carrot dangled above the world, the Big Apple polished itself up in a forty year project that spans my lifetime. The changes I have seen...
So after yesterday's challenging submission, I give you an easy Monday morning: Milton Glaser's original pitch for I (heart) NY hangs augustly at MoMA, a piece of popular art, derived from another medium as Pop Art often is, but elevated by purpose, by performance, and by recognition. This logo is instantly recognized around the world, is copied for effect, for satire, or, movingly, after 9/11 for example, resurrected for charity. But for its power to steer the most cosmopolitan city the world has ever known away from an iceberg, this four-character logo deserves its own museum in my mind.
It saved my home.
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