Monuments to the important

Once upon a time, we named significant buildings and stadiums after significant people. As pointed out by Thomas Vinciguerra in an editorial in The Week (incidentally, one of my very favorite things to read) that tradition continues to fall away in favor of selling off naming rights to the highest (usually corporate) bidder, with Shea Stadium in New York recently being renamed in honor(?) of Citibank. I find this particularly sad in cases like this when someone gets bumped. Not that I actually knew who Shea was before reading this article, despite literally a lifetime of following one of the Mets major rivals in baseball futility, the Cubs.

Here in the Triangle, people hadn't really gotten to the point of remembering the name Raleigh Sports and Entertainment Complex before the negotiations with RBC bank concluded and it was forever (or at least until the next bidder comes along) dubbed the "RBC Center". The only whining here, I believe, was over who got how much of the cash and when. Oh, and "what the heck is RBC?"

I first thought about this probably 10 years ago when I briefly held the naive misconception that the new United Center in my hometown of Chicago was named in some sort of altruistic unity movement rather than the airline based there. Ha!

Anyway, I've also noticed in our travels that more and more roads, bridges, and highways have small signs saying that they are commemorating someone who was from that town. So rather than naming buildings and stadiums after the significant people in a town, we are naming sections of roadways. Maybe its fitting, given our obsession with driving. Or maybe its just a step along the progression and next DOTs around the country will be selling naming rights to roads too, in an attempt to raise the funding required to build them. Hmmm, now there's maybe an idea....