What’s in a name? Apparently not much if it happens to be the “Innovation District.”

Boston City Hall’s years-long, head-scratching attempt to rename the booming Seaport is officially dead.

When I caught up with him the other day, Brian Golden, head of the Boston Planning and Development Agency, took the opportunity to put the final nail in a very dumb idea.

Golden noted his agency no longer uses the Innovation District name moniker in its voluminous marketing and planning materials.

After eight years, this experiment in top-down rebranding, in which City Hall attempted to rename an entire neighborhood by edict, has come mercifully to an end.

“‘Innovation District’ defines that part of the world in much narrower terms than is reflected in the word ‘Seaport,’” Golden said. “In reality, it is more than just that.”

Golden added that Seaport is a much more all-encompassing name that makes it a better fit for the area itself, a mix of office high-rises, condos, hotels and yes, tech companies, along with traditional maritime uses.

It would be a stretch to call the Seaport name a stroke of marketing genius, but it has certainly stood the test of time.

It made its debut in the late 1990s, back when Boston planning officials were trying to jumpstart the redevelopment of what was then a vast expanse of waterfront parking lots and rotting piers in the shadow of the Financial District.

And the Seaport name has withstood more than one attempt to replace or alter it, with new names flowing out of City Hall seemingly every few years with each new plan for redeveloping the city’s old industrial waterfront.

When developers and city officials were trying in the early 2000s to win over South Boston residents and pols to proposals for millions of square feet of new development in what was then a little-used backwater, simply calling the area the “Seaport” was judged to be inadequate.

Seaport for a time became the South Boston Seaport, at least in planning documents and press releases pumped out by various city officials.

Scott Van Voorhis

But that wasn’t enough for the late James Kelly, the years-long city councilor from South Boston. Kelly took things a step further and had the council vote to officially rename the whole area the South Boston Waterfront.

Kelly immediately rang me up at my desk at the Herald after the vote to inform me that I was now all but legally required to use the South Boston Waterfront moniker in all my stories about development in the area. No more using the Southie-dissing Seaport name, he insisted.

I tried but failed to explain to Kelly that the Herald could call the area anything it darn well pleased, but that’s neither here nor there.

While Boston planning officials still feel obliged to use the name – and apparently Massport too, with its new 1,500 space garage, the South Boston Waterfront Transportation Center – it’s not exactly taken the waterfront by storm. Do a Google News search and the closest thing you will find is “South Boston’s Seaport District.”

The Innovation District

In fact, there’s real monetary value to the Seaport name, as can be seen in a lawsuit by Fidelity Investments to protect the name of its Seaport Hotel from plans by developers with plans to build their own “Seaport” hotel two blocks away.

You don’t spend money suing to protect a worthless or generic name, which brings us back to the good old Innovation District.

Like other failed attempts to rename the waterfront, Boston officials seized upon the Innovation District label in response to the challenges of the moment.

Under the late Thomas M. Menino, the city’s longest-reigning mayor, city development officials circa 2010 were making a big play to lure fast-growing bio-tech and tech firms from Cambridge over to the Seaport.

The plan was to further spur the redevelopment of the area and it certainly achieved some notable successes, including landing Vertex.

But that success was based on an overheated and expensive Cambridge office and lab market and a still largely empty stretch expanse of undeveloped land near the waterfront in Boston, not the renaming of the area the Innovation District.

Frankly, Innovation District has got to be the least imaginative name possible for one of the most dynamic new sections of Boston, a generic place name akin to renaming the Fenway the “sports district” or the area around the MFA the “arts district.”

Worst of all, the whole experiment in rebranding the waterfront was entirely unneeded. The new neighborhood already had a name, the Seaport.

There was no need to replace it, and certainly not to make way for the bland and boring Innovation District.

Scott Van Voorhis is Banker & Tradesman’s columnist; opinions expressed are his own. He may be reached at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com.