Warriors owner Franklin Mieuli unveiled his team’s new uniform on a Friday. By Saturday morning, the bad reviews were pouring in.

“I feel like a postcard,” one anonymous San Francisco Warriors player was quoted on Oct. 1, 1966, as saying about the team’s new jersey, which sported the words “The City” with images of the Golden Gate Bridge and a cable car.

“When I first saw them, I thought it said ‘Daly City,’” another said.

The media, if anything, were even harsher.

“The only Warrior who really straight-out said he liked the uniform was rookie Joe Ellis, and that happened on the first night when he scored 15 points,” Chronicle sports editor Art Rosenbaum wrote days later. “For 15 points, Ellis would have worn a C-cup brassiere if the boss ordered it.”

Fifty years after critics declared it a failure, the Warriors “The City” jersey is the team’s No. 1 selling jersey and an undisputed retro classic. The Warriors, who wore the uniform Tuesday, March 29, will again on Tuesday, April 5, this season built a second court with the 1966 logo emblazoned in the center. When team All-Stars Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green were chosen for a recent Sports Illustrated cover, they showed up in their The City jerseys.

It’s a symbol of the franchise’s survival, part of a last-ditch effort to give the team a local identity during hardscrabble times that seem inconceivable now in the era of sold-out arenas, Splash Brothers and rapid NBA growth.

But perhaps above all, The City jersey is a tribute to its creator, first Warriors owner Mieuli, a man who loved San Francisco and basketball, using every skill at his disposal to ensure that both had a future together.

“Franklin Mieuli would have been Mark Cuban if he had the money,” says NBA Hall of Famer Rick Barry, who was a second-year player when The City jersey debuted. “He was the maverick kind of guy. He was different from what was out there. He beat his own drum. Look at what he did coming up with that jersey …”

The Warriors, purchased away from Philadelphia by a Mieuli-led group for $850,000, arrived in San Francisco in 1962 with a halfhearted shrug of a parade.

Just four years earlier, the city had greeted Willie Mays and the incoming Giants like heroes with a ticker-tape shower on a crowded Market Street. For the Warriors parade, after arriving from Philadelphia, Chronicle photos show Wilt Chamberlain looking awkward in a convertible, the sidewalks all but abandoned.

“It was a totally different environment, a different world,” says Barry, who was drafted in 1965. “The NBA always had a great product, but when I played they didn’t market it well. We used to play at the tiny Civic Auditorium, and they didn’t even sell that thing out. I remember the promotions they had. ‘Buy one and get one free.’ It was crazy.”

For the franchise’s opening night on Oct. 23, 1962, just 5,400 fans showed up to watch Chamberlain score 56 points against the Detroit Pistons. Fewer than 1,500 people showed up to the game after that.

Rather than admit defeat, Mieuli fell back on his skills as a marketer. Art Spander, who covered the team for the Chronicle in 1966, remembers unusual stunts, including a candlelit cocktail party on press row. Mieuli would invite local luminaries to ring a cable car bell, anchored to the scorer’s table, before foul shots. Mieuli himself became a larger-than-life figure; he took to wearing a Sherlock Holmes-style deerstalker hat.

“When I was a beat man at The Chronicle, I’d be working the desk, and he’d come by with bags of fruit from the Navlet’s nursery that his family owned. ‘I’m hoping you’re going to write a nice story,’” Spander says, laughing at the memory. “I was sarcastic. The Warriors weren’t very good.”

Forming connection to S.F.

When Mieuli was a boy, he and his parents lived in San Jose. On special days, they would drive up to San Francisco.

“As a kid, he would always go to ‘the city’ to visit his grandparents,” says Mieuli’s son Peter, who was a teen when the jersey premiered. “Like a lot of people who grew up in San Jose, we said that whether you were going to see a show, or going to a football game. It was always, ‘We’re going to ‘the city.’ My dad had that embedded in his head.”

By 1966, four years after the team’s arrival and coming off two losing seasons, there was still little connection between the Warriors and their new city.

So Mieuli decided to turn his players into human visual aids. He designed designed The City jersey himself, with an image of the Golden Gate Bridge on the front and a cable car climbing to the stars on the back. He got a deal from friends in the advertising world, unveiling The City campaign on dozens of unsold billboards bought at discount.

“They had come from Philadelphia, and he wanted to establish them as a San Francisco team,” Peter Mieuli says. “So he picked the two most popular things when people think of San Francisco, and he put them on a jersey.”

Peter Mieuli says he was sorting through his father’s things and found an old Mickey Mouse Club logo with a circle. He suspects it was an inspiration for The City.

“This is only my connect the dots. If I would have found it when my dad was alive, I would have asked him,” he says. “But that’s kind of the way my dad thought. He admired Disney and the marketing that they did, and he knew that round circle could be adapted.”

New home, new logo

Chronicle photos of those first games in 1966 games suggest the jerseys were made in haste. The logo looks like it was screened too high, with the “The” in “The City” placed on the shoulder strap. Star center Nate Thurmond’s No. 42 was off center that first season, the “4” overlapping on one of the bridge’s towers.

“San Francisco, or as some would have us believe, ‘The City,’ plays the Philadelphia 76ers at 9 p.m. in a National Basketball Association exhibition at the Cow Palace,” Spander’s season-opening game story began.

But there were early signs that Mieuli’s design had made a connection with the fans. Months after the jersey’s debut, San Francisco’s synchronized swim team, led by national champion Margo McGrath, showed up with the Golden Gate Bridge displayed on their swimsuits.

The Warriors gave San Francisco something to cheer for in The City’s first year, playing well before losing to the 76ers in the NBA Finals.

Unable to get a San Francisco arena deal done in the years that followed, Mieuli moved the team to Oakland in 1971 and changed the team’s name to Golden State. The Warriors won Mieuli an NBA championship in 1975 with a new logo featuring an outline of California.

Big seller inspires homages

Even after the jersey was gone, the influence of The City continued. NBA teams, including Seattle and Denver, started using city imagery on their jerseys in the 1970s. The City routinely makes uniform best-of lists. In 2004, GQ named The City one of the two greatest pro basketball uniforms of all time, along with that of the Indiana Pacers.

The City jersey was resurrected as one of the NBA’s “hardwood classics” in 2001, and the Warriors have worn them as alternate uniforms this year. Warriors chief marketing officer Chip Bowers reports the jersey is the best-seller this year, on a team that is leading the NBA in merchandise sales.

“There’s not much that we put (The City) logo on that doesn’t sell well these days,” Bowers says.

Obvious homages have cropped up in the Bay Area and beyond. Oakland residents can buy a “The Town” shirt with port cranes instead of the bridge. For Alameda residents, it’s “The Island.” The NBA Trailblazers unveiled a “Rip City” rip-off last season, using landmarks of Portland, Ore., in the circle.

But the influence arguably reaches far beyond that. Mieuli’s jersey design helped pioneer a wave of popular designs using urban imagery. Oakland fashion line Oaklandish has built a thriving business sharing Mieuli’s ideal that it’s cool to represent where you come from.

“It’s a really strong logo. We’ve done a lot of plays on designs that are inside a circle,” says Oaklandish CEO Angela Tsay, who studied sociology in college. “Not that The City logo was the first time that someone put something inside a circle, (but) that design element pings that part of your brain that thinks about the Warriors. Just that circle.”

Carrying on proud tradition

The jersey means different things to different people. With the team planning to move back to San Francisco, some in the East Bay view it negatively.

Still, there’s respect for the history, even among those who didn’t grow up with it. After a recent practice, Warriors forward Green showed some admiration for the former owner he never met.

“That has something in it, in itself: ‘The City,’” Green says. “You know, like if you go to L.A., they’re going to call Los Angeles ‘The City.’ If you go to Michigan, they’re going to call Detroit ‘The City.’ Everybody has their city. But to have the confidence to put ‘The City’ on the jersey? I like that.”

Green says he hopes the younger generation of players — Green was born in 1990 — doesn’t ever forget about the past.

“When you talk about Alvin Attles and Rick Barry and all the other guys who wore this jersey,” Green says, “it’s like, ‘Wow. And I get to play in the jersey that they played in?’ Those guys did some special things around here. You try to carry that on.”

A marketing victory

Despite what was reported by the press, Barry and Tom Meschery, a Warrior from 1962 to 1967, say they don’t remember locker room dissent when the jerseys were unveiled. Both love the jersey now.

“I loved it from the very beginning. I thought it was terrific,” says Meschery, a San Francisco native. “I don’t know whether Franklin was ahead of his time, but in San Francisco, we always called it ‘The City.’ ... People in New York might argue, but it was always ‘The City’ for us.”

Mieuli sold the team in 1986 but was a fixture at games until shortly before his death in 2010. When you talk to ex-players, Mieuli’s name still comes up.

“For someone walking around wearing the freaking deerslayer or deerstalker hat, it wasn’t like (The City logo) was something that was bizarre,” Barry says. “From a marketing standpoint, it was brilliant. I mean, why not be different from the status quo?”

Spander says he’s thrilled The City logo has lived on. The team’s current majority owner, Joe Lacob, has also embraced the team’s history.

Peter Mieuli says his father lived to see fans wearing The City jerseys, decades after they premiered. And the longevity of Franklin Mieuli’s idea was ultimately the only review that mattered.

“He saw a lot of that,” Peter Mieuli says. “And he was thrilled, of course, that it came back.”

Peter Hartlaub is The San Francisco Chronicle pop culture critic. Email: phartlaub@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @PeterHartlaub