An Advertisement For Failure

In yesterday’s Philadelphia Inquirer, writer Jeff Hurvitz tries to make a case here for allowing Unisys Corp. to place its sign amidst the downtown Philadelphia skyline, and he also tells us…

The request by Unisys to display its name near the top of the building that will house its world headquarters - Two Liberty Place - was met by a strong opposition during hearings with the Philadelphia Zoning Board of Adjustment last week. A follow-up hearing is scheduled for September.

It is imperative that the board approve that request.

Residents who recently bought condos in the otherwise commercial use structure are contending that the 11-foot-high letters will detract from the aesthetics of the structure and thus reduce the value of their investments. To call this massive building a "residential community" is like calling a horse a cow, simply because it can supply milk.

In legal terms it is called caveat emptor - buyer beware. For the few to stymie the benefit of the many is absurd.

And aside from impugning those who actually had the audacity and bad business sense to buy property in the same building where Unisys proposes to hoist their hideous signage, Hurvitz takes a potshot at those “twentysomethings” who find it “hip” to leave Philadelphia and look for better employment elsewhere.

(Before I continue, though, this disclosure and a mea culpa; family members of yours truly work in the sign-making industry, and I don’t know if they have a contract with Unisys or not. My criticism isn’t with their work, but with the aesthetics of the Unisys logo, which I always though unintentionally showcased the amateurism of the company as a whole. And I apologize in advance for any possible negative economic impact upon any party noted by reference or association in this post, but I feel like I have to say this.)

On the matter of employment, the Inky tells us here that Bushco’s Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us that area employment was up slightly in May, though, as McClatchy tells us here, our ruling cabal has effectively managed to hide the numbers of long-term jobless in their doctored figures. Regardless, it’s childish for anyone to impugn anyone of any age group for trying to better their careers by leaving this area (trying to find recent employment numbers by region in this country and having some difficulty – I’ll keep looking).

But the real issue I have with allowing the Unisys signage atop Two Liberty Place really doesn’t have anything to do with the aesthetics of the sign (bad as they are) and the pain it would inflict on those unfortunate enough to live there.

It is the fact that Unisys is an awful company (I ripped into them here, with a post title that was meant as a parody of their advertising slogan at that time), and if I were Mayor Michael Nutter, I wouldn’t want to allow them free advertising and thus besmirch the city’s name in the process. They bled capital and slashed their workforce for years before they realized some recent growth through expansion of consulting services and (you guessed it) offshoring.

Trying to fend off charges of provincialism and imagining some benefit for “the many” by granting Unisys some primo publicity far into the future are hardly justifications for allowing this ludicrous request (at least Comcast, with their many faults, isn’t a quarter or two away from a slide into the financial abyss).

As many of us know, Unisys was formed by the utterly mindless merger of Sperry and Burroughs many years ago in a move by Michael Blumenthal to get rich off the new company’s inflated stock price. The end result was not unlike “putting perfume on a pig,” which is what this corporate mistake remains to this day, regardless of how it is “branded.”