University City has undergone a makeover in the last five years. With the apparent changes of Penn's surrounding community arrives a new logo, unveiled by the University City District on June 28.
UCD, a private organization, was founded in 1997 as one of former University President Judith Rodin's West Philadelphia initiatives. In an effort to reinvigorate the neighborhoods and streets surrounding Penn, an organization was developed and chaired by John Frye, Penn's executive vice president at the time, to improve and maintain cleanliness and safety, and eliminate the negative perception of the community.
"We felt it was the time in the evolution of the organization to stop and look back on all the things we had done in the last five or six years," Executive Director of UCD Eric Goldstein said of the organization's new logo.
"University City was an incredibly different place, and was suffering from negative perception, high crime, graffiti, trash and very little investment," Goldstein said of the community, prior to the implementation of UCD. "After five or six years, it was time to gauge what people were thinking."
To do this, UCD hired the consultant group Kanter International to develop a new logo for UCD to support the vision the organization had of the community.
A telephone survey conducted by Kanter International revealed that Philadelphia residents outside of University City no longer shared negative perceptions of the area. With the improved opinion of public safety and sanitation came one minor complaint.
"People would say, 'We know that great things are happening in University City, we just don't know what they are,'" Goldstein said.
The new logo will attempt to create a new identity for University City that will advertise the area as a distinctive, intellectually based community with an international and multicultural population.
"Left of Center" -- the tagline accompanying the logo -- refers both to University City's location west of Center City and to its qualities as an avant garde and ethnically rich community.
Because University City is populated with several academic institutions that draw international faculty and students, the community boasts unique offerings.
"If you look around the country, areas that have that kind of concentration tend to be very progressive neighborhoods and play to, or have a variety of, arts and culture that you don't find in the rest of the city," Goldstein said.
Also, because the previous logo looked "municipal," the organization was often mistaken for part of the city's services, Goldstein explained. UCD operations are funded through private donations, thus any confusion could be detrimental to its funding.
The impact of the organization, expressed through their new logo, is not limited to Penn's campus. UCD's services extend to 50th Street, with a heavy presence in the areas west of 40th Street, which are predominantly urban neighborhoods.
"Most of our funding comes from the big institutions, but most of our services are delivered off of the University," Goldstein said.
