W. Hollywood Has Designs on Finding a City Symbol

Good morning, Mr. and Ms. America and all the ships at sea. Flash! The young city of West Hollywood is holding a design contest to find an official logo that will best reflect that new city’s image.

OK, now that all you gag writers for late-night TV talk shows have thrown down this newspaper, leaped from your chairs and run to your typewriters to bat out a fresh round of West Hollywood jokes, everyone else can read on.

West Hollywood, which voted itself cityhood last November on the strength of a coalition of renters, homosexuals and senior citizens, is finding itself in need of the same symbols of its official status that any other city does.

The city’s stationery is rather bare, “kind of missing a little bit,” admitted Mayor Valerie Terrigno, who has been surveying other cities’ seals for inspiration and found “some with mountains and trees, some with little animals.”

“I saw one that had a Spanish helmet on it,” the mayor said.

“We don’t know what we’ll end up choosing,” she said, but whatever it is, it should “capture the identity of what we stand for and what we hope to be.”

What the city has come to stand for is a lot of things, including rent control, senior citizens’ rights and, most pioneering and attention-getting, gay equal rights ordinances. How to get all that on a city seal, which on an official letterhead is usually reduced to about the size of a quarter, will bear watching.

The design contest is, in the spirit of West Hollywood, open to anyone--indeed, people from South Dakota and Oregon have already submitted entries, said Gaylee Weinberg, media director for the city’s publicity firm, Communication Works.

About 500 flyers, black on lemon-yellow paper, outlining the rules and the $500 award for the top design, have been distributed throughout town, left in businesses, restaurants and bars, in places “where people hang out,” said Janet Martinez of Communication Works.

“Who better to capture the character of West Hollywood than those who live, work and play here?” the flyers coax. “Be an image maker, become involved in West Hollywood’s image development!”

About 35 entries, by children, commercial artists, even senior citizens, have already been received, and “they run a gamut from very graphic, just with the letters ‘West Hollywood,’ through deco-type through modernistic type,” Weinberg said, “everything from real city-seal looking . . . to very creative, beautiful elaborate drawings.”

The entries show “a lot of symbols of unity--hands clasped, gavels, signs of community support--a lot of intertwined-type symbols, a lot of winding, be it hands or vines or different kinds of symbols,” Weinberg said enthusiastically.

The nation’s capital has the Washington Monument, St. Louis has its Gateway Arch, New York has the Statue of Liberty, but at least one entry in the contest depicts one of West Hollywood’s major landmarks, said Weinberg--the Pacific Design Center.

The City Council should have plenty to choose from before the winner--or winners--are announced June 3. Despite the spirit of equality, some seals may be better than other seals, and the council reserves the right to pick and choose, mix and match bits and pieces from any number of entries, combine them and divide the prize money accordingly.

And lest the jokesters out there think otherwise, Weinberg acknowledged that the city is not unaware of the image that its high-profile gay rights stand and gay city officials have created in some minds.

“There certainly is” a chance that some entries of marginal taste will be submitted, she agreed. But so far, “there’s been nothing I wouldn’t show to a 6-year-old.”