City of Industry, California to change name to Grand Crossing if it gets a football stadium
The name of the area where a new football stadium is planned to be built in Industry, California will change its name to Grand Crossing if the stadium is built there.
The planners of the stadium, which will seat 75,000, have now stopped calling the area ‘Industry’, according to John Semcken, vice president of developing at Majestic Realty Co. The company plans to build the stadium at a 600-acre site in Industry, which
will cost about $800 million.
“I was specifically asked if I could change the name of the city by the National Football League, and I said yes, and I did it,” he said. “It's an impression that they have, which was a negative impression, and there's no reason to have it. You just get
rid of it.”
Industry is a small city about 15 miles outside of Los Angeles, California that features light industry, including food makers and warehouses. Semcken says that the name Grand Crossing would be used to address the location of the stadium once it is built.
Grand Crossing is one of the two proposals that are trying to bring professional football back to the Los Angeles area. No team has called Los Angeles home since the Los Angeles Rams and Los Angeles Raiders went to St. Louis and Oakland respectively over
15 years ago. The city has the second largest television market in the United States and another sports and entertainment company, AEG, has been creating a plan to rival the one by Majestic, which features a stadium in downtown Los Angeles that will seat 64,000.
Both of the plans include relocating a team, maybe even two, to Los Angeles. There is a long list of teams that are already striving to maximise revenue but are unable to do so because they cannot get a stadium built for them in their current city.
G.U. Krueger, advisor for HousingEcon.com Inc., says that Majestic is making a smart move by thinking like residential developers and changing the name of a location to give it a better image. Many housing developments in Southern California give their location
a Spanish name that brings back the area’s Mission era, he said.
In Los Angeles, developers have changed the name of the area around Staples Centre and LA Live to South Park, in order to differentiate it from Skid Row, a neighbouring area that has a worse reputation. The name ‘Grand Crossing’ was borrowed from the name
of another development that Majestic built near Industry.
Chief linguistics officer for Strategic Naming Development, Diane Prange, said that it was a good idea to change the name of the area before people got used to calling it Industry.
“I believe the word 'industry' has those connotations of not being where somebody wants to go for an entertainment venue or being where somebody wants to go to spend an evening with family,” Prange said.
Both firms have less than a month to finalise their proposals before they will be submitted to the city of Los Angeles and voted upon.
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