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What's in a name?

We'll soon be putting on the Ritz at the Taj

By Sam Allis, Globe Columnist  |  November 12, 2006

I may go to my grave without ever uttering, "Meet you at the Taj for drinks."
Early next year, though, some corporate suits out of Mumbai will pray I start saying precisely that. Late last week it became official: the Taj Hotels Resorts and Palaces agreed to buy the Ritz-Carlton, Boston -- the real Ritz on Arlington as opposed to that eyesore on the other side of the Common -- and will change its name to the "Taj Boston."
My first reaction, predictable as a Pavlovian dog, was How dare they?
My second was, what the hell?
Absent was the reflexive moan of a cultural Neanderthal I am on occasion accused of being. I'll grieve the loss of yet another iconic Boston name much the way I grieve the loss of a good silk tie with balsamic vinegar on it. It's nothing to end up in a locked ward over.
I won't wax ad nauseam about the wonderful crones in cashmere and pearls who tossed down a couple of silver bullets at the Ritz for lunch before lurching to Symphony Hall on Friday afternoons.
I won't mourn the social descent of this thoroughbred of a city toward Schenectady, or whine with a heavy heart, there goes the neighborhood.
Such cant is even more tiresome than the bloviation of someone with some gin in his glass droning on about his putting stance.
Boston's Brahmin culture disappeared with the Celtics dynasty, and has been living on fumes ever since. What the city markets now is nostalgia, and, for a dwindling subset, serious history.
Besides, for all of its lore, the Ritz does not enjoy ancient bloodlines. Its family tree is more of a shrub. The place was built in 1927, in the manic splash before the Depression and long after Boston had begun the steep slide down from its 19th-century perch as the Hub of the Solar System. (For the record, Oliver Wendell Holmes, who coined the term about the State House, not the city, had his tongue planted firmly in his cheek.)
What first struck me about the change is the total, rather than partial, obliteration of the storied Ritz name. Hotels get bought and sold all the time, and names routinely get altered in these transactions. But new owners with any smarts blend the new with the old into hybrids when history is involved.
Consider another Boston dowager, the Copley Plaza. It is now the Fairmont Copley Plaza. The Fairmont folks didn't erase its Copley bloodlines; they built on them. The venerable Parker House is now the Omni Parker House.
In each case, attention is drawn to the new corporate reality while honoring tradition. The Fairmont and Omni suits clearly expect us to keep calling those hotels by their historic names.
So I had my knives out for the Taj team. I was poised to eviscerate them for cultural insensitivity and corporate hubris, and was crestfallen to learn they wanted to keep the name but couldn't get it. There will be no hybrid, let alone original, at 15 Arlington St. because under the sales agreement, Millennium Partners held onto the Ritz-Carlton brand when it sold the hotel.
"It was never in the cards," says Ray Bickson, who heads the parent company of the Taj group. Bickson and his team briefly considered "Taj Arlington" and "Taj Newbury" before settling on the sensible "Taj Boston." Given the situation, I'd do the same.
The name change won't kick up much dust anyway because everyone is going to call the Ritz the Ritz until the next ice age and assume that any mention of the Taj must refer to some tandoori place near Central Square.
Also, "Taj" isn't all that bad, when you think about it. The word rolls off the tongue rather nicely. It is, like "Ritz," a strong, one-syllable name. "Meet you at the Taj for drinks" sounds a lot better than "Meet you at the Quality Inn On Arlington for shooters" or "Meet you at the Best Western By The Garden for some frosties."
And we could be in for a lot worse. Citigroup announced last week that it paid $34 million for naming rights to the Wang Center. Brace yourselves because banks generally favor names with the charm of debentures.
I'm betting the Taj Boston will do just fine. The Observer stayed at the original jewel in the Taj crown, the sprawling old hotel built during the British Raj near the arched Gateway of India, in what was then Bombay. The experience was sublime, particularly because the bill was on someone else's nickel.
We're also in a global economy and what better way to prove it than have a first-class Asian outfit run a great old Boston hotel? We already have Hong Kong roots in Robin Brown's upcoming Mandarin Oriental on Boylston.
The Langham on Post Office Square, the new face of the old Meridien, has blue British blood and Hong Kong ownership. Jury's, in the old Boston police headquarters on Berkeley, hails from an Irish outfit.
It's still sad to lose the Ritz on Arlington and downright galling that the soulless place off Tremont with a restaurant called Jer-Ne gets to keep the name. But I'm liking our new cosmopolitan flair, so maybe I'll meet you at the Taj for drinks after all.
Sam Allis's email address is: allis@globe.com