Sears Tower Becomes Willis Tower Thursday
CHICAGO — Sports fans have dealt with it for years: a favorite team sells the naming rights to its stadium in a lucrative, if unsentimental, money grab.
But when Chicago residents go to bed Thursday night their beloved Sears Tower, one of the world's iconic skyscrapers and the tallest building in the U.S., will no longer be the Sears Tower. It will be Willis Tower.
Or will it?
"It's always going to be the Sears Tower. It's part of Chicago and I won't call it Willis Tower. In Chicago we hold fast," Chicago teacher Marianne Turk, 46, said as she stood in line to go up to the building's Skydeck on Monday.
Mayor Richard M. Daley, the building's owners and others will be at a Thursday renaming ceremony hosted by Willis Group Holdings. The London-based insurance services company secured the naming rights as part an agreement to lease 140,000 square feet of space in the tower.
The building has been known as Sears Tower since it opened in 1973. It's original tenant, Sears Roebuck and Co., moved out in 1992. A real estate investment group in 2004, American Landmark Properties of Skokie, now owns the 1,450-foot, 110-story skyscraper.
When the renaming was announced in March, a spokesman for Willis Group Holdings said the company understood the "sentimental attraction to the Sears Tower name," but noted the company was bringing hundreds of jobs to the city.
The Sears Tower isn't the only well known building to undergo a name change – New York City's Pan Am Building became the MetLife Building and Chicago's Standard Oil Building is now the Aon Center, said Carol Willis, founder and director of The Skyscraper Museum in New York.
Historically, skyscrapers have been ever-changing buildings and businesses within themselves, acting as a commodity to compete for high rents and tenants, Willis said. People are mistaken when they see tall buildings as symbols of a corporation, she said.
"Skyscrapers are really buildings that are about money," Willis said. "Naming rights are an asset of the building. They can be turned into money and that's what the new owners are doing."
It's become common for professional sports teams to sell the naming rights of their stadiums and arenas, as Chicago White Sox fans can attest, when their team's stadium, Comiskey Park, renamed U.S. Cellular Field in 2003.
But the public hasn't always taken to renamed skyscrapers. Many New Yorkers still refer to the Sony Building as the AT&T Building, said William Lozito, head of Minneapolis-based brand naming company Strategic Name Development. Getting the public to accept the Willis Tower name will be all the more difficult because the company is British and not immediately recognized by most Americans, he said.
"I don't think people are going to let go," Lozito said. "You don't mess with a landmark. It would be like trying to change the name of the Brooklyn Bridge. It's a reference point. I think it's disorienting to try to change the name."
The tower's owners acknowledge it will take time for some people to accept the new name, but they're confident it will happen eventually.
"It is controversial to a lot of people," said John Huston of American Landmark Properties, who represents the building ownership. "It is an icon, but I believe over time it will become known as Willis Tower and a name that we'll be proud of."
Alex Lucas, 29, an Arlington Heights business systems analyst who works down the street from the skyscraper, was so displeased with the name change that he started a Web site, . http://www.itsthesearstower.com
"The people of Chicago do value history," he said. "Just because it's a commercial structure doesn't mean it isn't historical. Chicago is going to lose a big part of what is its identity and I don't know what's going to fill that space."
John Russick, a senior curator at the Chicago History Museum, said residents see skyscrapers like the Sears Tower, with its dominance of the Chicago skyline, as landmarks, sculptures and icons.
"The first building you see when you're coming home on the horizon is the Sears Tower," Russick said. "We miss something when we don't see them as the fabric of our civic memory."
The new name isn't the only major change this year at Sears Tower. Last month, owners announced a $350 million greening effort, complete with wind turbines and solar panels, along with plans for a 50-story luxury hotel. For tourists, glass-bottomed enclosed balconies on the 103rd Skydeck were opened earlier this month, giving visitors a 1,353-foot look straight down.
All these efforts were part of a plan aimed at remarketing the building as a pioneer and reintroducing it to the world, owners say.
"Success for us is making this a place where more people want to be," Huston said. "Our goal is to transform the reality and perception."
The question now is after Thursday's ceremony what will people around the world call the transformed skyscraper.
"It will probably always be the Sears Tower," said 46-year-old farmer Jane Turmail of Vallonia, Ind. "It seems a little strange, but then things have to change."
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On the Net:
Sears Tower: http://www.searstower.com
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CARYN ROUSSEAU | July 15, 2009 11:51 PM EST |
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