PhillyDeals: Sixers-Flyers arena gets a new name - again

Halfway into a 29-year, $40 million naming-rights deal, the South Philly arena that's home to the NBA Sixers, NHL Flyers, and a lot of high-priced pop-music shows is getting its fourth new name.

The 21,000-seat auditorium, formerly named after the vanished CoreStates, First Union, and Wachovia banks, is now the Wells Fargo Center, president Peter Luukko of owner Comcast-Spectacor said Tuesday.

What had been Wachovia is under new owners and yet another new logo, sign, and color scheme. But it's the same bank, with the biggest market share in Philadelphia, according to federal bank data.

Workers from Eastern Sign Tech, of Burlington, rose in cherry-picker buckets to lift the blue letters off the arena's green-and-blue Wachovia signs. New red-and-black Wells Fargo signs should be up by Sept. 14, when the singer Lady Gaga is scheduled to perform for a sold-out house, said Comcast-Spectacor spokesman Ike Richman.

Comcast-Spectacor "is honoring the contract that was agreed upon" with CoreStates Financial Corp. back in 1996, Luukko said in a statement. The next year, Philadelphia-based CoreStates agreed to sell itself to the former First Union Corp., which later merged with Wachovia Bank and adopted its name, until Wells Fargo took it over.

Wells Fargo & Co., an $800 billion-asset San Francisco-based company, bought the failing Wachovia two years ago, after the Charlotte, N.C., lender's own disastrous purchase of yet another bank that lent billions to people who didn't pay it back.

Wells Fargo is only now getting around to exercising its rights to rename the South Philly arena, as it prepares to slap the Wells Fargo name on more than 300 ex-Wachovia branches in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and South Jersey.

"We thought that having the signs change in time for the start of the center's new season was the most logical and most visible way to introduce the Wells Fargo brand to the region," bank spokeswoman Barbara Nate said.

Wells Fargo is a history-conscious company: It maintains horse-drawn stagecoaches used for promotions and charity events, recalling its roots as a primitive Old West transportation firm.

But the name has had little resonance in Philadelphia, which was horse-ridden in pre-automotive times, but has more recently and emphatically been associated with locomotives, helicopters, satellites, and other powerful conveyances, with modern engines, some of which are still made in the region.