Another reason to stop renaming venues

I've blogged before about how annoying it is that they keep renaming Toronto theatres every time they get a new corporate sponsor. Here's another problem:

Today a very nice family stopped and asked me directions. By my best read on the situation, they're newcomers to Canada who live in 905 and are in the city for a special family outing. They didn't seem to be used to navigating the subway and the busy sidewalks with their gaggle of young children, and seemed rather overwhelmed by the whole situation.

I'm walking by, apparently looking like I know where I'm going, so they stop me and ask me directions. I can tell that the place they're asking for is a recently-renamed venue, but I don't know what it was called before (i.e. what I have it labelled as in my mind), so I don't know where it is. It was a part of town I'm not completely fluent in, so I wasn't even able to give them a "your best bet is in that general direction." So I apologized profusely for not being able to help them, and left them standing on the sidewalk with their gaggle of children, trying to find someone who can give them directions.

I just got home and googled up the place they were looking for. I've been there several times. I could totally have given them good directions complete with landmarks for the kids to keep an eye out for. But because they renamed the place, I was useless. Instead of being helpful and welcoming to these tourists and newcomers, I was useless and gave them a suboptimal Toronto experience.