Say goodbye to the Sears Tower

This is sad.

Farewell Sears Tower: Tallest Building in U.S. Renamed

CHICAGO — Sports fans have dealt with it for years: a favorite team sells the naming rights to its stadium in a lucrative, if unsentimental, money grab.

But when Chicago residents go to bed Thursday night their beloved Sears Tower, one of the world's iconic skyscrapers and the tallest building in the U.S., will no longer be the Sears Tower. It will be Willis Tower.

Or will it?

"It's always going to be the Sears Tower. It's part of Chicago and I won't call it Willis Tower. In Chicago we hold fast," Chicago teacher Marianne Turk, 46, said as she stood in line to go up to the building's Skydeck on Monday.

Mayor Richard M. Daley and others will join the building's owners at a ceremony Thursday to officially rename the tower after Willis Group Holdings, a London-based financial servicescompany that secured the naming rights as part an agreement to lease 140,000 square feet of space in the tower.

The building has been known as Sears Tower since it opened in 1973. It's original tenant, Sears Roebuck and Co., moved out in 1992, and a real estate investment group formed in 2004 now owns the 1,450-foot, 110-story skyscraper.

Am I the only one who noticed the typo in that last sentence?