Corporate Naming Rights = Emo! (Re: "Who Is This Building?!?")

Thank you, Matty, for bringing up the ol' CoreStates center, which is actually a truly noteworthy building in the lurid history of corporate naming rights. It's perhaps the first modern professional sports facility with corporate naming rights (ie, excluding Busch Stadium, for which a corresponding brand was created after the stadium was named).

Currently, of course, stadia are routinely financed partially by the public and partially by the team's plutocrat owner, who then sells the stadium's naming rights to offset his own contribution, while the local taxpayers get no such consideration.

How-EVAH, during the planning stages of the erstwhile CoreStates Center, there were no such expectations that the team owner would foot none of the bill while the taxpayers got soaked. (In case you're not old enough to remember this, there was actually a time when team owners paid for their own goddamn stadiums.) And so, in financing a new sports facility in a financially insolvent city, Ed Snider came up with the idea to sell naming rights to offset the taxpayer money, not his own money. No public financing was used.

Now, of course, that system has been stretched past its limits to line the pockets of robber-barons like Jerry "Holocaust" Jones, but like most things that end up as huge blights on society, it actually started out as a pretty good idea.


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