City’s largest tower gets a name change

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/01/2010 (5919 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

You can forgive Winnipeg’s largest tower if it’s undergoing a bit of an identity crisis.

The edifice that still has Commodity Exchange Building above its Main Street doors has been rebranded 360 Main Street to reflect its address even though many people in town still call it the Trizec Building.

Frank Sherlock, vice-president of Crown Property Management, which manages the Portage and Main landmark, said the decision behind the name change is based on the fact the Winnipeg Commodity Exchange doesn’t exist anymore. The open-outcry trading floor went silent with the move to electronic trading five years ago.

“The trading floor is still there but it’s sitting idle. We’ll deal with that in the summer when the lease expires. We’ll probably convert (the 7,000 square feet) to office space,” he said.

Crown Property Management decided to make the name change last summer when it undertook a nearly $3-million renovation of the building and adjoining Shops of Winnipeg Square.

Sherlock noted the tower was never actually called the Trizec Building, even though that’s how things evolved.

He said Trizec was the developer when the building was going up in the late 1970s and opened in 1980.

“It was always in the papers and the name seemed to stick. It was unintentional,” he said, noting the Commodity Exchange naming rights actually expired in 1990.

“We don’t want to be driving people crazy with the naming of the building. People say, ‘You’re changing it to 360 Main Street, I thought it was called the Trizec Building.’ Rather than causing confusion, we’ll use the address and let it grow on people.”

Derrick Coupland, principal at Blacksheep Strategy, a Winnipeg-based branding consulting firm, was underwhelmed by the new name and said it sounds like a “holding pattern” until the owners can secure new naming rights.

“360 Main Street is brand neutral; it’s neither positive nor negative, which is a place you don’t want to be,” he said.

Coupland said the reference points of the former names, however, will survive.

“It’s a certainty that many people will continue to refer to it as the Trizec or Commodity Exchange Building and use either one for giving directions. If you asked most people where 360 Main Street was on a map, they wouldn’t know. But if you ask where the Trizec Building or Commodity Exchange Building is, everybody would know,” he said.

The irony of the situation is the Trizec name officially disappeared from the Canadian landscape in 2006 after Trizec Canada and Trizec Properties were acquired by Brookfield Properties Corp.

Sherlock said the Commodity Exchange signage will be replaced in the spring but in the meantime, he hopes people take notice of the back-lit sign in the building’s lobby, which is visible from the street, that spells out the new name.

geoff.kirbyson@freepress.mb.ca

Let’s take a 360

THE 539,151-square-foot building is bigger than Canwest Place (477,322 square feet) and the Richardson Building (424,135 square feet). It has a vacancy rate of under five per cent, Sherlock said, and its biggest tenant is law firm Aikins MacAulay & Thorvaldson LLP, which occupies three floors.