Next Stop in New York: Ad Central Station?

"The MTA is in such dire shape, they are billions of dollars short in their capital plan," said Gene Russianoff of the Straphangers Campaign, the city's best-regarded transit watchdog. "They've borrowed a ton of money in recent years, and there's tremendous pressure on the fare."

MTA officials stressed Tuesday that the names of some city landmarks -- the Brooklyn and Triborough bridges and Grand Central station -- would be sacrosanct. And any cash from the sale of naming rights, they said, would go toward general expenses, rather than to the upkeep of particular stations.

In the 1980s, the Ben & Jerry's ice cream magnates Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield offered to take over a station on the West Side of Manhattan and make it a gleaming temple to hippie capitalism. But they ran afoul of the labor rules and wound up running full-page newspaper ads denouncing the unions before retreating to Vermont.

"It's not as easy as it looks to fix a city subway station," Russianoff noted.

Some detect in the proposal a trend toward unfettered commercialism in the nation's largest city. Jazz festivals are named for cigarette companies, basketball backboards carry corporate logos, and the mayor has proposed auctioning off the names of certain parks.

New York City's blood may run mercantile green, but enough is enough, say advocates.

"It's all ad-creep, the conversion of our public spaces for corporate self promotion," said Gary Ruskin, a native New Yorker and director of Commercial Alert, an Oregon-based group that wages a nationwide campaign against advertising in public spaces. "It's the wrong way to celebrate the 100th anniversary of subways, to celebrate that history by erasing it."

Still, even the best intentioned have tried their hand at selling naming rights. A few years back, the Straphangers Campaign started a contest to name individual subway cars after famous American people or places. The idea was to place a plaque on each sponsored subway car. The effort never quite got off the ground, but there were some brilliant entries.

Russianoff still recalls his favorite: "A Subway Named Perspire."