22-Mar-10 – It surely crosses a few minds every day, especially when walking or driving along Dearborn Street past Marina City. What is a “Bin 36?” Is it better than a Bin 35? Is this some technical wine term that I am deeply ashamed to admit I don’t know?

Well, yes and no. As BIN 36 owner Dan Sachs explains, “Wine is often stored in ‘bins,’ and it is a common term in the [wine] business.”

And the 36?

“A little tricky,” says Sachs. “I wish there was a sexy explanation aside from ‘36 seemed like a lucky number’ [but it] does not have any specific significance.”

He says they wanted a name that would be “clearly identifiable with wine but also sound very universal, so that anybody would be comfortable coming into the restaurant.”

The back-story to business names at Marina City gets a little more interesting with Dick’s Last Resort.

According to Pasha Krise, Sales and Marketing Director for the Marina City restaurant/bar, Dick was a guy who opened an upscale restaurant in Dallas in the late 1970s.

“He was running out of money during the build-out of the upscale joint and so he simultaneously opened a little shack and sold ribs, chicken, and crab out of pails. He called it his ‘Last Resort.’”

You can guess what happened next. A few years later, says Krise, “the white tablecloth restaurant was out of business and Dick’s Last Resort thrived. It is all buckets of beer history from there.”

Isaac Tigrett founded House of Blues in 1992. In 1995, he announced plans to expand to Marina City.

David Fortin, Vice President of Marketing for House of Blues, says the name and their venues are “tributes to southern culture and blues music since it is the root form of music that led the development of nearly all forms of music we enjoy today in America.” In 2006, the adjacent House of Blues Hotel was sold and renamed “Hotel Sax.” According to the hotel operator at the time, Gemstone Hotels & Resorts International LLC, the name was “in deference to the city’s musical traditions.” (Left) Signs of Dick’s Last Resort and House of Blues on the west side of Marina City.

Focus group named Smith & Wollensky? Not exactly.

And that is all very interesting, of course, but our favorite story by far is the one behind Smith & Wollensky, the upscale restaurant on the east side of Marina City. It is difficult not to imagine Messrs. Smith and Wollensky as east coast investment bankers – like John Pierpont Morgan or former United States Treasury Secretary and Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, for whom JPMorgan Chase & Co. are named.

“Believe it or not,” says General Manager Regina Arendt, “Alan Stillman, the creator of the Smith & Wollensky Steakhouse chain, could not decide on a name for the steakhouse, so he opened the phone book, closed his eyes, and picked two names.”

Other commercial tenants at Marina City include Jefferson Beach Yacht Sales, Marina Cleaners, Marina Food & Liquor, Marina Management Corporation, Marina Towers Condominium Association, Standard Parking Corporation, and 10pin Bowling Lounge.

The commercial property is managed by Transwestern Commercial Services. Founded in 1978, Transwestern Property Company started with an ambitious name. According to the company’s web site, throughout the 1980s and most of the 1990s, the Texas company developed five million square feet in Dallas, Austin, and Houston.

The company now sells and leases property in 26 cities across the U.S.

(Left) A worker for Smith & Wollensky takes down a large flag of Ireland last Thursday that hung on the south side of the restaurant over St. Patrick’s Day.