LETTERS: Keep national chains out of Sansom Common

To the Editor: I hope that the University will avoid national retail or restaurant chains as tenants. Since a key part to the success of the project will be establishing a cosmopolitan atmosphere, especially at night, Sansom Common must be a shopping and dining magnet for residents throughout the region. There will be little motivation to come to Sansom Common if its stores and shops are the same ones an outsider could find right down the street at his or her local mall. To secure unique commercial tenants will be to compel people to come to campus to get that special dining or retail experience. Sansom Common should be a realistic destination for shoppers and diners throughout the region. Since national chains can pay higher rents and tend to be more secure financially, it is a risk for Penn to seek out more independent, entrepreneurial businesses. But it's that latter group which will give Sansom Common the buzz, the excitement, the draw, the nightlife. A sanitized national chain feel will not draw outsiders. I hope that the enormous effort to build Sansom Common will also include a big-time effort to revitalize the Annenberg Center. That could occur in a much shorter time frame. It's an incredible facility. It should be busy every night drawing people to campus. People coming to the center could walk down Walnut Street from the garage at 38th Street and see fabulous signage depicting in words and pictures all the great things being built for Sansom Common. It will get the public pumped up about coming to campus. Annenberg and Sansom Common: birds of a feather. Bill Hoffman Owner, La Terrasse Restaurant College '81 A dimwitted 'game' To the Editor: Scott Lanman attempts to question the Wharton School's affiliation with Penn by pointing out that Nexis articles in which Wharton is mentioned only mention Penn about 70 percent of the time ("The Wharton name game," SP, 6/19/97). Apparently not wanting to make Wharton feel it is being singled out for scorn, he concludes his column by noting that of 111 Nexis articles in 1997 which mention the "Annenberg School," "approximately half" refer to Penn or the University of Pennsylvania. One more knowledgeable about academia, or at least more familiar with the shaving habits of William of Occam, would have hesitated to use this latter fact as evidence of Lanman's somewhat shaky thesis. Yes, one might assume that since only half of the articles referring to the "Annenberg School" go on to mention Penn, this could support the argument that the denizens of Penn's Annenberg School are, in fact, a bunch of rabid publicity hounds hell-bent on dissociating themselves from Ben Franklin's University; or one might draw the simpler, and thus more likely conclusion, namely, that the Annenberg articles which don't mention Penn were in fact written about the Annenberg School for Communication of the University of Southern California! But what is logic, really, especially when it gets in the way of a perfectly good tag to a column? Maybe that's why nobody confuses The Summer Pennsylvanian with The Daily Pennsylvanian. Tom Nessinger Annenberg Graduate '97 Daily Pennsylvanian Columnist, 1996