This Sewage System Brought To You By Proctor & Gamble

Picture this: The St. Louis Golden Arches. Painted yellow and slapped with the McDonald’s logo.

Don’t laugh. It could happen. We’ve already got a toe on the top of that slippery slope as it is. It starts with renaming perfectly adequate structures such as our three local bridges spanning the Hudson: The Kingston-Rhinecliff, The Mid-Hudson, and the Newburgh-Beacon. The names work, right? In all cases, a traveler from out of town knows where they are, in two cases, they’ll know the cities the bridges connect. But no, this wasn’t good enough. There must have been too much money in the budget (or else our Congressman has been too busy “bringing home the bacon” grown from tax dollars we’ve already doled out), so suddenly the bridges have shiny new names and shiny new signs to commemorate their shiny new names. Now they are, respectively, the George Clinton Bridge (named for the first Governor of New York, and not a relative of the former president), the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Bridge (he lived nearby) and the Hamilton Fish Bridge (a beloved local politician who had something to do with the Newburgh/Beacon area, or so I’ve been told).

And for a small donation, your company or organization can “adopt a highway” which means that you get your name on a little blue sign that implies that you are somewhat responsible for that stretch of asphalt. Around here, these organizations include the Boy Scouts, the Vietnam vets, and my favorite, the Lesbian Visibility Project (although I’ve yet to see a single one anywhere near the parcel of road they’ve adopted).

With a little bit of lobbying and petitioning (and probably a hefty donation to someone’s reelection campaign), you can get an entire road named in someone’s honor. Locally, we have war heroes, politicians and other miscellaneous favorite sons and daughters. For instance, the road linking Kingston to Parts West is called the Clayton “Peg Leg” Bates Memorial Highway, named after a legendary African-American one-legged tap dancer who in 1951 opened a country club in Kerhonksen, New York.

OK, you say, these are not corporate sponsorships. But wait. We’ve had them for a very long time. The GE building in New York. The Sears Tower. The Macys Thanksgiving Day Parade. And few professional sports organizations still play in venues named for the team, the owner, or the geographical area in which they reside. You’ve got Minute Maid Stadium (formerly Enron Field until they went bust), Tropicana Field, Comerica Park, and the Mets soon-to-be new home, Citi Field (more on this in an upcoming blog). And my favorite local example, a concert venue in downtown Albany formerly called Knickerbocker Arena, known lovingly to locals as “The Egg” for its football-like shape. For years and years it was the Knick, but now it’s called the Pepsi Arena. Something sinks in my heart every time we pass the shiny new sign on the Thruway indicating that you can get to the arena at the next exit.

And probably buy a Pepsi once you get there.

Now I hear that the city of San Francisco is having a little trouble coming up with the funds to repair and maintain the Golden Gate Bridge. (I guess Nancy Pelosi has been busy lately) You would think that McDonald’s would be the logical choice to step in but no. Wells Fargo was one of the first corporations to throw its saddle into the rodeo. I guess it makes sense, and is less tacky as far as corporate sponsorships could go. Wells Fargo was in huge part responsible for the development of the west, so why shouldn’t they be able to buy a piece of one of the most prominent man-made landmarks in California?

It could be worse. It could be the Jerry Garcia bridge, and they’ll play Grateful Dead space music through speakers all day until the toll-takers are so zoned they can’t make correct change.

But what remains of Jerry’s estate probably won’t be enough to pay for all those construction workers to stand around tripping out on Dead, whereas a corporation could merely write it off.

You think NASCAR is choked with corporate sponsorship? Just wait. There is a lot of crumbling infrastructure in this country, and a lot of companies who would gladly shell out for a piece of the rock.