In life as in thermodynamics, nature abhors a vacuum. Evidently nature abhors radical name changes too. Remember the kerfuffle when new store owners retired the name Marshall Field? And note the blowback when someone even suggests changing the name of that other Field, Wrigley.
So we confess to being conflicted and perplexed about the news that Sears Tower is changing its first name to Willis. That would be jarring news about any 36-year-old, particularly one readily visible to millions.
We in Chicago are flatlanders, with a skyline sprouting from prairie the way mountains sprout from Montana. We’ve known Sears Tower as the tallest, most muscular steeple of that skyline since the day in May 1973 when construction workers lifted a beam autographed by Mayor Richard J. Daley to its pinnacle.
The baptismal name Sears made sense, testament not just to one local company but to the rich mercantile traditions that were essential to Chicago’s growth and global notoriety. The building’s blocky style embodied the city’s toughness, industriousness: It looks more democratic than elegant.
That won’t change this summer when Willis Group Holdings of London attaches its name to the tower. Willis isn’t buying the structure, which is owned by a partnership of real estate investors based in Skokie and New York. But as the name tenant, Willis will take 140,000 square feet of space in the tower for the same reason Sears, Roebuck built it: to consolidate employees scattered at various locations in and around the city.
Not a century ago, Carl Sandburg famously described his grittier Chicago:
Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders.
The healthiest cities, though, have since learned to lift not just with their brawn, but with their brains. After this change, many of Chicago’s big shoulders will carry the names of insurers: Aon, Hancock, Willis.
We don’t say that as a lament, but as an acknowledgment: Loser cities the world over yearn to have classy skyscrapers downtown, and companies eager to attach their names.
We’ll get used to this, all of us. Who peers up from East Randolph Drive at the shimmering white Aon Center and mourns the loss of the Standard Oil Building or that name’s successor, the Amoco Building? No one.
The Willis folks surely know that when our cousins visit from Grand Rapids — or our tourists from Grenoble — they’ll want to visit Sears Tower, and we’ll lead them there proudly without correcting them. We’ll relate the story of architect Bruce Graham, structural engineer Fazlur Khan and their proposal for two office buildings in the 50- to 60-story range. Eventually they and Sears, Roebuck couldn’t resist the distinctive (if no longer accurate) phrase “world’s tallest.”
Already there is pining from those who say Chicago is losing its soul. Too many changes already and here comes one more.
We hear these voices and their love for Chicago. There are gems — Grant Park, the lakefront, the museums — that merit our vigilance and to-the-death protection. Business buildings and their names? Their changes are parts of how cities and their identities evolve.
Those best-known lines of Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago” chronicled another era’s industries. Lower, though, Sandburg wrote the more important lines. They describe the raw commercial forces at play when, say, a Sears Tower become Willis Tower — and a new competitors reaches for the sky:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding.
