Naming rights (part 4 - coda)

The poor fellow with a toothache (right) is in a good place, affixed as he is to the Evans building, the flagship building of the School of Dental Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

The building went up in 1915, and I’d like to think that since then, his toothache has been attended to and he is simply howling in sympathy with students, faculty and alumni who are upset about the renaming of Logan Hall, previously the home of Penn’s medical school, business school (Wharton) and currently several departments of the School of Arts and Sciences.

Logan Hall was named in memory of James Logan, William Penn's colonial secretary and a founding trustee of the College of Philadelphia, the University's predecessor. According to Penn’s Website, Logan Hall is an “integral component” of the National Register's University of Pennsylvania's Historic District.

But it’s about to be renamed in memory of Claudia Cohen, a recently deceased alumna who earned a bachelor’s degree in communications there in 1972 — and went on to become a gossip columnist for the New York Daily News. She was also an entertainment correspondent for the TV show “Live With Regis Lee and Kelly Lee,” and garnered some boldface mentions for herself for her lucrative divorce (rumoured to be $80 million) from husband Ronald Perelman, the billionaire chairman of Revlon and a Penn alumnus.

It’s Perelman — or rather, his $20 million donation to Penn — that effected the change.

In 1995, the year after Perelman and Cohen divorced, he donated the unprecedented sum for the renovation of the Perelman Quadrangle which includes Logan Hall. The university, in turn, gave him the option to rename Logan Hall. He’s taken up the offer, and according to a Penn news release, “the name change (to Cohen Hall) will take place over the summer in order to be ready for the fall 2008 semester.”

Cohen died of ovarian cancer in 2007 at the age of 56.

But the renaming is not something Penn faculty, students and alumni are happy about. For example, history professor Richard Beeman, who was Dean of the College from 1998-2005, said he had not been informed of any potential name changes.

He also told >the Daily Pennsylvanian that although naming buildings after donors has become a common practice, it's unusual to completely rename a building when they can carry hyphenated names of both the original name and the most recent donor.

Ronald Shur, a 1977 Wharton graduate, commented that the Logan Hall designation should stand because the building is an "icon … not a whiteboard that you can constantly erase."

Naming rights (part 3)

Back in the first part of this series, I wrote that the name of Stephen A. Schwarzman—the exceedingly generous donor who just gave the New York Public Library $100 mil and for whom the iconic Fifth Avenue building is being renamed—would not actually appear on the building because the building is protected by landmark status.

Now the New York Times reports that Schwarzman’s name will indeed appear on the building—FIVE TIMES.

According to the story by Marc Santora, the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission agreed to not only the name change but also to affixing it at the base of each of the two centre columns leading to the main entrance; on a gold plaque on the marble floor just outside the front door; and in two locations at the 42nd Street entrance.

His name will not be as big as those of the library’s founders (like Astor and Tilden), but will be from 1 to 2.5 inches high. And it will appear FIVE TIMES.

Check out the Times story – there’s a link to a PDF file prepared by the Landmarks Commission that shows you just where Steve’s name will appear and what it will look like.

I don’t get it. What kind of ego or insecurity is it that drives people to pay to have their names plastered everywhere? There’s Schwarzman and the NYPL, all the people whose names adorn Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital and I just noticed that the names of Hilary and Galen Weston are etched into plaques near the old main entrance of the Royal Ontario Museum. The Westons coughed up $20 mil, and, a ROM press release says, the museum will name its 1933 heritage wing on Queen's Park for Hilary and Galen and the Weston family in perpetuity. (Note to all high-priced donors: “perpetuity” ain’t what it used to be.)

Christopher Isherwood, in a New York Times article last December, called this “the graffiti of the philanthropic class” and asked, “Whatever happened to Anonymous?”

“The naming game is getting a little out of hand, as every nook and cranny of these gleaming buildings is tagged by some wealthy, generous and obviously not publicity-shy donor,” Isherwood wrote.

His article also tells the story of the non-naming of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s business school. The dean was selling the name for $50 mil and no one came up with the dough. He discovered, however, that several donors were willing to contribute to a fund that would ensure that for at least 20 years, the school wouldn’t be “branded.” The no-name fund eventually reached $85 million.

You really ought to read the whole of Isherwood’s article, but I’ll leave you with this:

“Some may ask what the big deal is,” he wrote. “Would you rather they kept the money to themselves, and left the arts to languish? Perhaps not, but I don’t much care for the feeling of being beholden to a law firm, an airline or an investment banking tycoon for the privilege of checking my coat….

“…don’t those who give to the arts do so expressly to benefit a public good? All this naming mitigates the ideally selfless spirit, if not the fact, of such giving.”


(Photo of “Anonymus” is a freely licensed media file from the Wikimedia Commons.)

Naming rights (part 2)

Apologies, once again, to my worldwide fans, for the dearth of posts lately. I have been on the road for my day job, but hope to make up for it with some long-overdue information...

...starting with a "thanks" to Walt (of Crackskullbob) for his comment (under "And now for something completely different") giving the most inventive attribution for "April is the cruellest month" I've ever read, replete with riffs on the Kennedy assassination and other events of the 1950s and 1960s.

...and "thanks" to the anonymous commenter who corrected some of the misinformation I posted about the New York Public Library.

Now to return to the issue of naming rights. Here is a picture of Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital (apologies for the light standards and other urban detritus obscuring the view, and the fact that the pic is ever-so-slightly out of focus):



Or is it Mount Sinai Hospital? The sign says it is also the "Joseph and Wolf Lebovic Health Complex."

Or is it? On either side, we see that two wings are also named, for Isadore Sharp (left) and Lawrence S. Bloomberg (right). Close-ups here:








So whose building is it? What's the name of this place?

Stay tuned.