New York’s 30 Rock Building Will Get Comcast’s Brand

30 Rock, the iconic New York City building that has spent the last 50 years emblazoned with corporate initials — RCA, then GE — is about to get a new brand: Big, glowing neon lights that will shout “COMCAST” to the Big Apple sky.

This is funny for two reasons.

• New Yorkers probably won’t embrace the name. “Whether another name change will be embraced by the public, though, is arguable,” the New York Times reports. “It’s been a quarter-century since the two glowing red letters (“G.E.)iwere installed atop 30 Rock, yet many New Yorkers still refer to it as the RCA Building, after the company that founded the NBC network.”

• It should feed Philly’s natural inferiority complex: We’re about to have two Comcast buildings dominate our skyline — and they’re not going to be the most famous Comcast towers on the planet? Or even the region? Oh dear.

That sense of things probably won’t be helped by the Times’ description of the new sign:

As proposed, more modest 12-foot-high light-emitting diode signs that spell out Comcast in white uppercase letters would be installed on the broader north and south limestone exteriors, crowned by 10-foot-high NBC peacock logos. A 17-foot-high peacock would appear by itself on the western facade (more or less facing Philadelphia). Measured in overall square feet, the new signs would be slightly more compact than the existing G.E. signs.

New York is going to show us the peacock. We don’t know what that actually means, metaphorically, but it doesn’t sound good. (The New York Times)