Boston Properties set to re-name Citigroup.

With Citigroup making quiet moves to dump a chunk of the 18 or so floors it occupies at the landmark midtown tower 153 East 53rd Street, the building's owner, Boston Properties, is planning to drop the tower's oft used name, Citigroup Center, in a bid to distance it from its namesake tenant and attract flesh tenants.

Brokerage sources say that Boston Properties, which gained attention in recent weeks for buying the General Motors Building for a record $2.8 billion, will rename the tower 601 Lexington Avenue. The new moniker will also better link the building--whose dramatic sloped roof makes its profile one of the most iconic in the Manhattan skyline--with the cache of that avenue, rather than a side street address that tenants usually find less prestigious.

The name change isn't the only one the Boston Properties is planning. In a conference call with investors and stock analysts two weeks ago to discuss the company's acquisition of the GM Building, Mort Zuckerman, Boston Properties' chief executive, said that he is considering selling the naming rights to that building as well. General Motors, the giant automaker, developed the trophy tower in the late 1960s but is down to just three floors totaling about 120,000 s/f. Recently it decided to leave and signed a lease for roughly the same amount of space in 153 East 53rd Street--also known as 601 Lexington.

Both buildings have become so closely tied to their nicknames, many brokers say that they will be hard to drop, no matter what their address is.

229 West 43rd Street was The New York Times' headquarters for decades until the paper moved around the block to its new headquarters tower at 620 Eighth Avenue. Instead of going by its address now however, the building, which has hundreds of thousands of available vacancy, is routinely called 'the old New York Times Building,' showing that nicknames often die hard.

620 Eighth Avenue meanwhile is almost always called The New York Times Building.