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Lackluster City? Get a Brand

February 1, 2015 by Llewellyn King 1 Comment

If your city is mostly famous for being between two other cities, if its main claim to fame is “It’s a great place to raise children,” then it’s time for your city fathers to take a course in branding.
Cities that prosper — that bring in company headquarters, tourists and where the crazy rich want be — have to have distinguished brands.
New York’s brand is glorious excess. It has the brand of ever higher, stranger skyscrapers. The world’s most successful media mogul, Rupert Murdoch, has just plunked down $57.2 million for what looks to be the world’s most lonely living space: the top four floors of a 60-story, bronze-and-glass building of a kind that is now transforming the Manhattan skyline. Take a small plot of land, build until what you get is slender tower that defies nature and looks as though its purpose is to challenge a strong wind.
Murdoch’s aerie has glass on four sides, and he can see forever, at the least until other towers rise up. If you want to spy on him, you will have to do it by drone. His own paparazzi might try to get a picture using a drone, but where would they publish it?
If you have a few million to spare you can still get in the East 23rd Street building. But those that would make an eagle jealous have gone to Murdoch. Most of us would be scared up there: a new take on “Naked and Afraid” because without neighbors, there is no need to wear clothes.
Cities in the United States that have done the branding thing right are New Orleans, jazz and food; San Francisco, cable cars and attitude; Boston, higher education and hospitals (eds and meds); and Chicago, wind and the uber-hub airport. Washington is a special case: great museums, the White House and the Capitol, and palpable delusions of importance.
The branding ace, running in front worldwide, is London. The Romans gave it a head start, but it was not until the Swinging Sixties that London became a destination for the globe. You would think that the place had enough branding with the old features: Tower Bridge, the Tower, the Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace, plus the Changing of the Guard.
But no. London keeps adding dizzying new features to its brand superiority. There is the Tate Modern, an art gallery in an old power station; the London Eye, a Ferris wheel that has captured world attention and city imitators; a bridge across the Thames River that wobbles, and now a new bridge is planned with gardens and shops on it. Then there are the taxis — black boxes, that remind you where you are in case you have overlooked the big red buses.
The current mayor of London, Boris Johnson (who has branded himself as a possible prime minister) has been keen to preserve and protect the London brand by insisting on preserving the double-decker buses, distinctive taxis and other expensive city bric-a-brac, because it is a hell of an investment.
Sure Paris has the Eiffel Tower, but it is aging. Rome has the Coliseum — talk about aging. And St. Petersburg has the Winter Palace and the Hermitage. But for city branding, London is in front and pulling away, as the Brits exploit the cash value of differentness.
Providence and Baltimore are two cities of which I am particularly fond. But I would urge the city leadership in both places to get a brand, a trademark. It pays. Rides (London Eye, Eiffel Tower elevators, the San Francisco cable cars) are sure winners. Could I suggest an amphibious train across Baltimore Harbor, and the mother of all rollercoasters – big, but not scary — in Providence?
Like London and New York, these days you have got to think big in city branding, or you will miss the incredible fun and profit of a city being silly.
Frivolity pays, ask London’s Boris Johnson — and share a thought for Rupert Murdoch, stuck up in the sky. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: Boris Johnson, Coliseum, Eiffel Tower, Hermitage, King Commentary, London buses, London Eye, London taxis, Paris, Rome, Rupert Murdoch, St. Petersburg, Winter Palace

Eiffel and Ferris, Engineers of Joy

May 21, 2009 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

 

 

With so much talk of infrastructure renewal, a case needs to be made for a few new toys for grownups of the kind that enliven London today, and once enlivened cities and nations.

 

Time was when you wanted to get your city spruced up, you held a world’s fair. All through the19th century and well into the 20th century, the legacy of world’s fairs was that they left permanent attractions for the public to enjoy long after the gates had closed.

London’s fair of 1851 left behind the glorious Crystal Palace, which sadly burned down in 1936.But the idea was sowed for the two legacies that outlasted all the other world’s fairs: Gustave Eiffel’s tower for the Paris Exhibition of 1889 and George Ferris’s wheel for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. Both men were great bridge builders and enormously gifted engineers.

Eiffel, who originally wanted to build his tower for an exhibition in Spain but was rejected, faced limitless criticism. Architects, authors, journalists and poets formed a common front against the tower. They said it would destroy the beauty of Paris; it was ugly and dangerous; and, of course, it was too expensive.

Supposedly the writer Guy de Maupassant ate his lunch in the tower every day after it went up, so that he did not have to look at the “high and skinny pyramid of iron ladders.” Eiffel built himself an apartment at the top of the tower, and threw lavish parties there.

Today the Eiffel Tower is the symbol of Paris, and the most popular tourist attraction in the world.

When it became clear that the organizers of the Chicago exhibition were having trouble in coming up with a spectacular structure of their own, Eiffel, whose ego matched the height of the tower, offered to help them out. But the planners could not face the humiliation of bringing in a Frenchman to save the day.

Luckily for them Ferris, who was attending an engineering meeting where the lack of a project was lamented, sketched a passenger wheel on a napkin and the day was saved. Ferris’s original wheel did not survive, but countless Ferris Wheels have enhanced public entertainment ever since.

The London Eye, which opened on the South Bank of the Thames River in 2000, as part of the millennium celebrations (it is also known as the Millennium Wheel), is the most popular tourist attraction in Britain. Take another bow, George Ferris.

The Eye, designed by David Marks and Julia Barfield, a husband and wife architect team, was briefly the largest passenger wheel in the world. But Singapore and the eastern Chinese city of Nanchang rushed to build bigger wheels. However, the Eye is the largest cantilevered wheel–which means, like a windmill, it is supported only on one side–and this is what makes it so elegant.

World’s fairs are a thing of the past in the age of television, and the fact is their legacy has not always been as great the legacies from Chicago and Paris. The 1964 World’s Fair left behind nothing special in Flushing Meadow, N.Y. Its Unisphere still stands, but it is not a big attraction. Likewise, nothing spectacular remains from the 1967world’s fair in Montreal. And the Space Needle in Seattle is a local rather than a national attraction.

The message is that people want beauty, but also participation; a wheel to ride on, a tower to ascend.

When it comes to toys for millions, London stands front and center–and is even a little egocentric. Those buses! Those taxis! Where else? Recent additions to the public amusements of London, besides the Eye, the foot bridge over the Thames River, dubbed the Wobbly Bridge; the New Tate art gallery in the old Battersea power station; new subways and a revived St. Pancras railway station, which is even grander than it was in its Victorian heyday.

Not all of London’s attractions required public money. The Eye was largely funded by British Airways and is operated by the people who run Madame Tussauds.

Once, London ruled much of the world. Now, it beckons it. In America, we are losing the race for public fun–and profit. –For Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: Eiffel Tower, Ferris Wheel, London Eye, Space Needle, Unisphere, world's fairs

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