Column: From Vista Tower to St. Regis Chicago - another Chicago case of naming rights whiplash
Holy Sears Tower!
Names clearly are not forever on Chicago skyscrapers, unlike the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building and even One World Trade Center in New York City.
Sears Tower morphed into Willis Tower. The John Hancock Center became 875 North Michigan Avenue. The Standard Oil Building was the Amoco Building, then the Aon Center. Of Chicago’s five skyline giants, only the Trump International Hotel & Hotel Chicago retains its original name.
Money talks and names walk. There’s no room for sentimental attachment to names. Everything is for sale.
Were the owners of the nearly complete Vista Tower, Chicago-based Magellan Development Group, so desperate to snag a hotel for their 101-story, Jeanne Gang-designed hotel and condominium skyscraper that they were willing to give up a name they had promoted for years?
Apparently so.
The change, revealed Wednesday by the Tribune’s Ryan Ori, reminds me of the whiplash-inducing renaming of the world’s tallest building in Dubai, known as the Burj Dubai before it opened in 2010. The new name, Burj Khalifa, paid tribute to the ruler of oil-rich Abu Dhabi, the neighboring emirate that bailed Dubai out of a financial crisis.
“Vista” had an appealingly simple quality to it, rather like the noble simplicity of the curving, three-tiered tower itself. It suggested views, both of and from the tower.
In contrast, “The St. Regis Chicago” is just another brand name. And it’s not exactly fresh.
It’s at least the second Chicago hotel with “Saint” in its name, following the nearby St. Jane Hotel, which was previously the Hard Rock Hotel and, originally, the Carbide and Carbon Building. The St. Jane name, however, is reportedly going away.
True, there’s no storied history to the name Vista Tower, unlike Sears Tower, which was around for 25 years before Willis Group Holdings, a London-based insurance brokerage, cut a deal in 2009 that slapped its name on the 110-story high-rise, once the world’s tallest.
Also, Vista Tower was the second name of blue-green glass tower at 363 E. Wacker Drive. It was initially “Wanda Vista,” recognizing its majority equity investor, China’s Dalian Wanda Group. Dalian Wanda, which had been expected to operate the skyscraper’s hotel, announced in July it would sell its stake to Magellan. That forced Magellan to find a new operator, no easy thing at a time when COVID-19 has dramatically reduced travel.
In an email Wednesday, Gang expressed pleasure that Magellan got a high-quality hotel to anchor the tower and signed the acclaimed Alinea Group to run its restaurants. “It’s really a wonderful combination! So the new name is welcome!” she wrote.
Activity inside the tower will make it an everyday part of urban life, not just a skyline symbol. Nevertheless, with its first condo owners about to move in, The St. Regis Chicago is giving me a bad case of naming rights whiplash.
As much as they seem like human-made mountains, as sturdy and unshakable as the Rock of Gibraltar, skyscrapers are subject to the relentless, ever-changing demands of the marketplace, which wear on them as inexorably as the beating of the sun and the howling of the wind.
In a telling example of that shifting identity, the Prudential Insurance Company of America demanded in court this year that its name and signs come off its namesake Chicago tower, whose facade includes a carving of the company’s iconic Rock of Gibraltar logo.
The erasure of the short-lived Vista Tower name offers the latest reminder that the names of our skyline giants are anything but permanent.
Blair Kamin is a Tribune critic.
Twitter @BlairKamin
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