ABSTRACT
The year between the summers of 1976 and 1977 offers a unique window on New York City’s official turn to branding itself in response to crisis, and the contradictions inherent within this approach. Leading the effort was the public-private relaunch of the Big Apple campaign. As we saw in Chapter 4, Big Apple was initiated in 1971 by the Association for a Better New York
(ABNY) and the Convention and Visitors Bureau (CVB) to stem the tide of corporate move-outs and declining tourism. It was retired in 1974 with the onset of fiscal crisis, and given its seemingly final burial in 1975 by the police and fire unions’ internationally publicized Fear City campaign, as we saw in Chapter 5. But now this ambitious PR effort first conceived by local realtors and hoteliers was to be embraced by city government and turned into a large-scale, summer-long campaign, strategically linked to two national media events that were coming to town: New York City’s celebration of the US Bicentennial, and its hosting of the 1976 Democratic National Convention. The new Big Apple was to shy away from contemporary images of New York, drawing instead on mythic, transhistorical representations of the city as a national and global capital. The big photo-op was “Operation Sail,” in which regattas of colonial-era tall-ships and modern luxury liners cruised New York Harbor past the Statue of Liberty and a downtown skyline crowned by the newly completed World Trade Center. This visual montage of New York’s glorious past and triumphant future would serve, it was hoped, to blot out the ongoing, present-day horrors of the crisis. It would also present New York City, and particularly its downtown financial district, as a family-friendly tourist destination and attractive site for investment, conventions, and corporate headquarters location.
