The Big Apple Wants Its Slice

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg didn’t get to be a billionaire by overlooking opportunities, or by letting other people glom onto his.

Now Bloomberg wants his city to get more aggressive about its own opportunities.

As if New York’s elbows weren’t sharp enough, the city has begun nailing down the legal rights to everything that says “New York” to people -- and perhaps, to be safe, a few things that don’t.

New York, for example, has applied to trademark the phrase “The World’s Second Home,” presumably cutting off Canberra and Reykjavik at the pass, in case they or other cities had designs on the slogan.

“The World’s Second Home” isn’t meant to replace “The Big Apple” or “The City That Never Sleeps,” officials emphasized. But it’s an alternative -- potentially a paying alternative -- to those better-known monikers that have passed into the public domain.

The slogan is the zingiest of several phrases that New York is proposing for trademark status, “Made in NY” being another.

As part of the same initiative, New York has launched a global merchandising program that centralizes the rights to municipal logos, images, vehicle replicas -- even street signs -- under one agency known as New York Marketing.

“Essentially, we’re creating NFL Properties for New York,” the city’s chief marketing officer, Joseph M. Perello, said, referring to the pro football licensing juggernaut that controls the use of logos on jerseys, stadium blankets, bumper stickers and the like.

New York’s initiative was prompted in part by the flood of products -- many of them not officially licensed -- that bore the logos of the New York police and fire departments, seeking to capitalize on the goodwill that followed the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center.

“The idea is to protect and own what is uniquely yours,” Perello said. “It requires identifying and protecting your intellectual property and building a business to monetize it, so you can bring the revenue back to the city.”

So be on the lookout for official Gotham-themed snow globes, magnets, mouse pads and insulated travel mugs, to name a few of the items that the city envisions being sold in souvenir shops.

For some product lines, the city will offer exclusivity within vast global regions. For example, with the right proposal, you could control the Asian and Australian continents’ license for bathroom accessories with a New York attitude, as displayed by the street sign: “Don’t Even THINK of Parking Here.”

As for “The World’s Second Home,” Perello said the phrase referred to the notion that no matter where you come from, in New York you can find familiar foods and music, you can hear your language spoken, you can probably find somebody from the village next to yours.

Early reviews are a bit discouraging, however.

Real estate mogul and reality TV star Donald Trump told the New York Post that he hated the slogan, saying: “New York shouldn’t be second at anything.”

Jerry Roberts, a Greenwich, Conn., resident quizzed during a break in his game of platform tennis, said he didn’t get it either.

“Don’t we have enough of those guys sleeping in Grand Central without encouraging more?” he asked.