The Washington Business Journal reported yesterday that the Washington Convention Center will be officially renamed to honor D.C.’s first elected mayor, Walter E. Washington. Apparently the D.C. Council approved the name change last year, though we can’t recall having heard about it at the time.

The idea is a fine one though, and Washington is certainly worthy of having his legacy honored. So what’s the problem? As of Nov. 5, the building will officially become the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. Perhaps you can see it now.

City Paper’s Erik Wemple makes a good case:

My objection is to the name itself: Take a close look. Right now, the place is called the Washington Convention Center. The guy they’re hoping to honor is Walter E. Washington. The new name, if I read the press release right, is “Walter E. Washington Convention Center.”

That’s bullshit. It should be “Walter E. Washington Washington Convention Center.” This is like calling our landing strip across the river the “Ronald Washington National Airport.” Or calling our low-cost landing strip the “Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Airport.”

Pretty funny stuff, though in reality less sinister — the more accurate comparison would be if the folks who went around renaming area airports had just done away with the old names altogether and called them “Ronald Reagan Airport” and “Thurgood Marshall Airport.” Granted, those simplified names would have been confusing for travelers and met with a deserved amount of hostility from the locals. Still, there’s nothing that dictates the Washington Convention Center has to contain its location in its name. In fact, the current name with the location is already vague enough that neither our convention center nor the one in downtown Seattle has bothered to register www.washingtonconventioncenter.com. So let’s just name the building only after a person, and be done with it.