Modis Building to be Wells Fargo Center

[duvaldude08]

Well I passed DT last night and the top of the BOA building is lite up at night. I think they just recently started doing that because I don't remember seeing any lights previously.

unless something changed yesterday, there is only a small bit of uplighting near the top of the BofA tower...it has been on for years...what people want to see is the pyramid top lit up

I found a picture from superbowl weekend and I seen the pyramid lit up at the top. LOL yes we need that back. We were at the top of our game that weekend I must admit. That should be every day

[hightowerlover]

I almost guarantee it will be the mustard gold. 



Salt Lake

Spokane, WA

Englewood, CO contrasts with a black background

Los Angeles goes eskew

Arlington, TX added some neon

San Fransisco keeps it classical

Atlanta

Miami

Birmingham has white.

[duvaldude08]

I think it should be like the one in San Fran. I think the classic look would fit Independant square perfectly.

[Timkin]

Spokane , Washington

[JeffreyS]

Arlington, TX added some neon so one vote.

[Ocklawaha]

"Good wife Libby," just tossed a zinger into this discussion. "Isn't it interesting to you that they waited until AFTER an election that had a pro downtown candidate running against an announced anti downtown development candidate to announce their intentions, connections?"

Gotta hand it to her, that's an idea that might have more feet then any of us realized.

OCKLAWAHA

[hightowerlover]

Spokane , Washington

Haha - i guess they don't like hotlinking - Spokane, WA is what I anticipate ole' Modis to resemble most once complete, but we'll see...

[wsansewjs]

Well FartToe Frank! (Well Fargo Bank)

So the building needs to be frank in order to contain the farts from the toes of the occupants in the building in order to be well!

Just a random, "OMG HAVE YOU LOST YOUR MIND" moment brought to you by... me.

Realistically, I think it would be nice to have the White Text with deep shadow behind it, then at the night, the logo would emit lights from the behind to give the dramatic effect.

-Josh

[duvaldude08]

Arlington, TX added some neon so one vote.

I dunno man. The neon seems a little tacky to me. I think the neon would be ok, if it were done differently perhaps. Im not to fond of theirs.

[Ocklawaha]

Stagecoach History

Since 1852 Wells Fargo rushed customers’ important business by any means â€" steamship, railroad, and, where the railroads ended, by stagecoach. At first Wells Fargo contracted with independent stageline owners. Then, by joining in the great enterprise of building reliable transcontinental transportation, Wells Fargo came to own and operate the largest stagecoach empire in the world.

Since then, Wells Fargo is forever linked with the six-horse Concord Coach charging across the vast plains and high mountains of the West.

That's not Wyatt Earp riding shotgun in this classic scene, he had blond hair however, he was just one of dozens of famous armed guards employed by the express companies.

The Butterfield Overland Mail, also known as the Oxbow Route, the Butterfield Overland Stage, or the Butterfield Stage, was a stagecoach route in the United States, operating from 1857 to 1861. In 1857, Wells Fargo joined other express companies to form the Overland Mail Company, establishing regular twice-a-week mail service between St. Louis and San Francisco. Wells Fargo had the route surveyed and shared in the financing.  It was a conduit for the United States mail from St. Louis, Missouri through Arkansas, Indian Territory, New Mexico, and Arizona, ending in San Francisco, California. The stage was an early operation of American Express and Wells Fargo.

In 1861, the Civil War forced overland staging to a central route across the Great Plains, through the Rocky Mountains, into the Great Basin, and over the Sierra Mountains.

Southern Express Company Routes

Remember your history teacher told you how far behind the rest of the nation the South was, yeah well...The South was almost entirely covered by the Adams Express service in 1861, when the American Civil War necessitated the splitting off of another company under Henry B. Plant, which, for political reasons, was given the name of Southern Express. There was a mysterious kinship between the two ever afterward, having joint offices at common points. Southern stock was never quoted in the market, and it was even charged by some Adams stockholders that Southern was secretly owned by Adams. The current official history of Adams, written in 2004, acknowledges that Southern was its subsidiary. Psst...the teacher was propagating a myth.

Along the more northerly mail route, passengers and Wells Fargo’s express rode the stages of the Pioneer Stage Line from California to Virginia City, Nevada. The Overland Mail Company, by now under Wells Fargo’s control, ran coaches from Virginia City to Salt Lake City, Utah. There mail and passengers connected with Ben Holladay’s Overland Express running through Denver, Colorado, and eastward to the Mississippi.

The Pony Express was established to prove that the nation’s mail could be carried across the West swiftly on the central route. From April 1860 to October 1861, young riders relayed mail across almost 2,000 miles from St. Joseph, Missouri to Sacramento, California in only 10 days. In its final months, the Pony Express became part of the stagelines’ U.S. Mail contracts. The Wells Fargo-run Overland Mail Company operated the Pony from California to Salt Lake City.

WANDERING MINDS WANT TO KNOW...OCK'S WORD SMASHING:

Sometimes considered the motto of the United States Postal Service, even used to refer to the Pony Express rider shown above, this is in fact a translation of a line written in the fifth century BCE by Herodotus, the Greek writer known as “the father of history.” His master work was On the Persian Wars composed between 500 and 479 BCE. In this famous passage, Herodotus praises the stamina and persistence of horsed messengers in the service of Xerxes, king of Persia. Hope you didn't think the Pony Express was purely American...NOT!

Now, for a moment of word study, check out this passage in Classical Greek, and don't freak out if a few letters differ from those in our Roman alphabet, shall we, boys and girls?

This is a rough transliteration so the Greekless MJ reader wants to know what Greek sounds like.

tous oute nifetos ouk ombros

ou kauma ou nux ergei

me ou katanusai ton prokeimenon

auto dromon ten tachisten.

In spite of the form in which I show the Greek, it is not poetry. It is Herodotus writing one of the first books on earth that may properly be called a history. Rather than scribble a mere list of what happened, Herodotus traveled to some of the Persian War locations and tried to write down the causes of human actions. Please allow me to examine a few of the Greek words in this passage and see if they are as weird and other-worldly to English as they at look to be.

Now here's a rough, literal, deliberately awkward, in-the-original-word-order translation of this passage of Greek prose. This same language train wreck applies to Spanish and almost all languages when translating from anything else into English (English is constructed 'backwards'). Whether or not one is a Christian, this also remains a huge comic error of the churches that demand the King James version of the Bible as the only correct translation.  A look at the following word-for-word translation is funny and if you translate it into English, and I translate it into English...all we can do is a thought to thought translation, so which one is correct?

"For these [riders], not snowstorm, not thunder-shower, not heat, not night shall work to delay their imposed mail-route (dromon) nor their carrying it out as fast as possible."

A formulaic phrase very similar to the one in Herodotus appears in Homer’s Odyssey, probably written down three or four hundred years earlier. Even by the time of Homeric Greek this ‘nor snow now sleet nor dark of night’ phrase may have become a cliché. Homer, it is thought, throve during an age when the oral recitation of epic poetry, the earliest mode, began to share presentation with written epics.

Bottom line, in the United States the Wells Fargo contract expired when the Pony Express was replaced by another means of communication. This particular express system only survived for a couple of years here, and ironically the same length of time in the ancient world.

My mother was born in Butterfield, Missouri, onetime home of a large operation and currently a ghost town in the southwest of the state. The Butterfield - Wells Fargo stage coach had a relay station, beenery, livery, and sundry feed and accessory buildings in the little town. Last time I was there exploring the roads were still unpaved and even locating where the town had been was difficult, ultimately I found the church leaning at about a 20 degree angle...my grandfather a Methodist Circuit Rider had built it over 100 years before my 'discovery'..

The Butterfield Overland Mail Company had the government mail contract from September 15, 1857. Originally all of the Overland Stage owners had submitted routes with relay stations and frontier forts that were north of Albuquerque, New Mexico territory; they had no knowledge of what was called the ox bow route.

John Warren Butterfield (who was in a partnership with the principals of Wells Fargo for the American Express company) was paid $600,000 (USD) to get the mail between St. Louis and San Francisco in 25 days. At that time it was the largest land-mail contract ever awarded in the US. It was required by contract to go through El Paso, Texas and through Fort Yuma near present day Yuma, Arizonaâ€"the so-called "Oxbow Route".  Nicknamed the “Butterfield Line” after its president, it ran 2,757 miles through the Southwest via El Paso, Tucson and Los Angeles and then up through California’s Central Valley to San Francisco.

Night and day the stage rolled on at a pace from 5 to 12 miles an hour across vast, treeless plains, jagged mountain passes, scorching deserts and rivers cursed with quicksand. The coached stopped only to change horses or let passengers slug down a cup of coffee with their beef jerky and biscuits. About 25 days later, it clattered into San Francisco! The western fare one way was $200 with most stages arriving 22 days later at its final destination.

This route was an extra 600 miles further than the central and northern routes through Denver, Colorado and Salt Lake City, Utah. However the southern route was free of snow. With the American Civil War looming the competing Pony Express was formed in 1860 to deliver mail faster and on a central/northern route away from the volatile southern route. The Pony Express was to succeed in delivering the mail in 10 days. But the Pony Express failed to get the mail contract.In 1861, the Civil War forced overland staging to a central route across the Great Plains, through the Rocky Mountains, into the Great Basin, and over the Sierra Mountains. The

Butterfield's assets as well as those of the Pony Express were to wind up with the Wells Fargo partners. A correspondent for the New York Herald, Waterman Ormsby, remarked after his 2,812 mile trek through the western US to San Francisco on a Butterfield Stagecoach thus: "Had I not just come out over the route, I would be perfectly willing to go back, but I now know what Hell is like. I've just had 24 days of it."
Employing over 800 at its peak, it used 250 Concord Stagecoaches and 1800 head of stock, horses and mules and 139 relay stations or frontier forts in its heyday. The last Oxbow Route run was made March 21, 1861 at the time of the outbreak of the Civil War.

Wells Fargo Stage Station, Virginia City, NV

Wells Fargo Express 'train' at Kansas City Union Station... (note to Amtrak/JTA: THIS is what the little driveways in front and behind the trains are used for, IE: you don't use pedestrian tunnels)

In 1861, the Civil War forced overland stages to a central route via Salt Lake City. In 1866, Wells Fargo combined several major stage lines over 3,000 miles of western territory. The distinctive red and gold Wells Fargo ran from from California to Nebraska, from Colorado into Montana and Idaho. The stagecoach became the enduring corporate symbol of Wells Fargo & Company.

Stagecoaches transported gold, silver, and money throughout the West. To protect its customers’ assets, Wells Fargo often employed shotgun messengers to guard valuable shipments, including brothers Wyatt and Morgan Earp in Tombstone, Arizona. If robbers stole treasure, Wells Fargo’s company policy was “never to abandon or relax the pursuit of anyone who committed a criminal offense against it.” Between 1870 and 1884, bandits attempted 347 stagecoach robberies. With the help of local law officers, Wells Fargo special agents James Hume and John Thacker pursued, captured, and secured convictions of 226 robbersâ€"including the notorious Black Bart.

When the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, the iron horse overtook the stagecoach, and Wells Fargo Express increasingly rode the rails. In 1888, Wells Fargo became the country’s first nationwide express company. “Ocean to Ocean” service connected over 2,500 communities in 25 states, from busy urban centers in the East, through the rail hub of Chicago and Midwest farms, to ranching and mining in the Southwest, to lumber towns in the Pacific Northwest.

By 1910, Wells Fargo’s network of customer service expanded to over 6,000 communities, large and small. Wells Fargo agents offered financial services such as money orders, traveler’s checks, and transfer of funds by telegraph. In 1918, Wells Fargo was an important part of the business community in more than 10,000 locations across the country and around the globe.

Something special about this coach...we operated a fleet of EXPRESS buses.

But that year, the U.S. Government took over the nation’s express and railroad operations as a wartime measure. (a nationalization who's disaster was so great that to this day America bucks anything government owned and operated) Wells Fargo& Co.'s Express was forced from the transportation industry, Transportation companies and particularly railroads were handed back to their private corporations, but they were largely a physical wreck.  but Wells Fargo Bank continued operations in San Francisco. Sound management helped Wells Fargo grow, as the Company weathered the Great Depression and met new consumer needs after World War II. Wells Fargo opened branch banks, keeping pace with American mobility and expansion.

New banking concepts not only changed where people banked, but how. As in stagecoach days, Wells Fargo pioneered banking convenience to customers: Drive-up tellers, banking by phone, credit cards, ATMs, and online banking offered innovations for modern customers.

By 1998, Wells Fargo Bank had expanded from a single location in San Francisco to its historic territory throughout the West, then extended across the Midwest. Today the Wells Fargo name once again extends to Eastern statesâ€"from “Ocean to Ocean.”

Do you see any passenger cars on this passenger train? BTW, this is the ROYAL PALM and she's headed to Jacksonville from Cincinnati and all points north with car after car of EXPRESS.

2008 marked the 150th Anniversary of the First Express Run from St. Louis to San Francisco.

Welcome home Wells Fargo!




OCKLAWAHA
(BITS AND PIECES FROM A COLLECTION OF WEBSITES)

[Riverrat]

I vote for white letters during the day and at night, white, but back lit/shadowed with gold (like the first image, Salt Lake). I think mustard yellow would date the building during the day.

[fsujax]

Noticed today the Wachovia signs on the Enterprise Center tower were gone.

[duvaldude08]

Noticed today the Wachovia signs on the Enterprise Center tower were gone.

Kool. The new signage atop the modis building is supposed to be done this month. I'll keep my eye out for it. I havent looked out there today.

[ChriswUfGator]

Just got back from Tampa and drove through Orlando, all the new Wells Fargo signage has just been installed on the former Wachovia buildings there, and they're definitely going with the traditional gold block lettering. Looks decent.

[Riverrat]

Just got back from Tampa and drove through Orlando, all the new Wells Fargo signage has just been installed on the former Wachovia buildings there, and they're definitely going with the traditional gold block lettering. Looks decent.

I was just going to say the same thing, but you beat me to it.  There are two Wells Fargo buildings downtown in Orlando and it looks okay on the one in the center of downtown...but the yellow really clashes with the one a little more east of downtown...the burgundy and blue tower with gold letters...not working so much. But yes, if they did it there with no regard to what would look best on the building, I'm certain they will do it here.