Convention Center Follies. Heywood T. Sanders
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package came in 1920 with a bond program including 18 individual items, with a total cost of $24 million. For the downtown interests, the 1920 package included $1.25 million for the central parkways and $900,000 for a new Municipal Auditorium.
The May 1920 effort saw six of the proposed 18 bond projects receive the required majority. The proposed auditorium garnered a 62 percent “yes” vote, and thus failed to pass. Its failure was part of a larger pattern described by historian James Primm: “For decades, small and middle-class property owners, especially in the heavily German wards, not trusting the big-business leadership and feeling that increased taxes would fall most heavily on themselves, had maintained a conservative stance that amounted to civic neglect.”5 But the failure of the auditorium and other proposals did not deter the commitment by some to a broad program of public investment. Less than two weeks after the vote, the city’s chief planner, Harland Bartholomew, argued, “That plan, though it has not yet been approved by the necessary majority of voters, is practicable and necessary, and it is only a matter of time when people will recognize its necessity and it will be adopted.”6
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch joined the call for a new bond effort, noting in December 1921 that the city needed $25 million to put local sewers in safe condition. The Chamber of Commerce also added its weight behind a broad program of improvements, including the failed public auditorium plan. As the notion of a broad package of public investments gained support, it also began to grow in size and scope. In early 1922 a General Council on Civic Needs, comprising more than 200 members, met to assess the full scope of required public spending. Their recommendation to the city government came to more than $75 million. The city’s official fiscal watchdog, the Board of Estimate, reviewed and altered the plans, adding a $4 million proposal for a new courthouse. The final package came to $78.1 million. At each step in the development of the capital program, new groups and interests successfully pressed to include their own “needs” and spending priorities. And in order to win African American votes, Mayor Henry Kiel and Council President Louis Aloe agreed to finance a new city-owned hospital serving the black community.
The grand product was a February 1923 bond program including 21 separate issues, with a total cost of about $88 million. The broad, comprehensive program proved a political success, with 20 of the proposals winning the required two-thirds majority, including the new auditorium with a $5 million price tag. St. Louis’s new Kiel Auditorium opened in 1934, combining an auditorium seating 3,600 and a massive exhibition hall, enabling the city to host major national events.7
For St. Louis, Kansas City, and a host of other cities in the first half of the twentieth century, the route to building a new convention hall was politically and fiscally difficult. The need to win majority or super-majority voter approval in most states limited the scale of public investment and often resulted in outright defeat. The electorate often proved less convinced than the city’s business and political leaders of the virtues in hosting conventions. The common political response was an effort to create a broad, indeed all-embracing, political coalition through a comprehensive package of public improvements. Kansas City and St. Louis succeeded by tying the public buildings and parkways sought by downtown interests to neighborhood-level improvements and basic facilities such as sewers and local parks, carefully distributed across the city and to specific voter groups.
The political pressures to marry proposed new convention halls and auditoriums to a host of other public improvements, however, did not necessarily assure electoral success. Both Kansas City and St. Louis were obliged to repeatedly put their auditorium plans to the electorate. And other cities, such as Chicago, saw local voters regularly defeat convention hall proposals. The history of public auditorium and convention hall votes was one of electoral fragility and uncertainty rather than public enthusiasm.
Public Improvement and Downtown Revitalization
The Depression and World War II severely limited the ability of city governments to finance major public buildings and improvements. By 1945, the end of the war and the prospect of boosting new private development led a number of cities to propose major public investment initiatives. Those initiatives often reflected plans that had been developed during the Depression, and commonly were focused on efforts led by the local business community to support the downtown core and remedy slum housing problems in adjacent neighborhoods.
Dallas, pressed by both the Chamber of Commerce and the “powerful Dallas Citizens’ Council,” had commissioned planning consultant Harland Bartholomew to develop a new master plan in 1943. While the plan covered a range of subjects across the metropolitan area, it included a specific effort to encourage the “development of a compact and stable central business district, wherein high property values can be maintained over a long period of time.” Bartholomew’s vision for supporting the downtown core focused on building a new complex of public buildings, sited where it could deal with the blight of nearby slums. And he specifically added, “One of the early needs is that of a Convention Hall,” located in “proximity to the downtown district.”8
Dallas’s plan for a new civic center, including a new city hall and public auditorium/convention hall, were joined with local street, sewer, and park improvements as part of a $40 million bond package in late 1945. The idea of a comprehensive package of public investments was very much parallel to the models of St. Louis and Kansas City, as was the premise that these improvements would enable Dallas to keep up with other cities of the Southwest. The civic center scheme that joined the city hall, library, and auditorium in one downtown location was the product of city planning consultant Harland Bartholomew, who viewed the proposed civic complex as a means of “exerting a stabilizing influence on the downtown district.”9 The new Municipal Auditorium, in particular, was described as a means of bringing new visitors to the downtown and supporting area hotels and retail stores.
Dallas’s entire $40 million bond package was approved by the voters in December 1945. But that electoral success did reveal a continuing problem in gaining public support. Of the seventeen individual bond proposals, the auditorium came in almost at the bottom of “yes” votes, just slightly better than the proposed city hall and a livestock arena. The Dallas electorate that could readily support sewers, fire stations, and street paving was much less enthusiastic about the benefits of a new municipal auditorium.10
Dallas was not the only city that viewed a new public convention facility, perhaps as one part of a new civic center complex, as a means of refashioning the landscape of downtown development. Seattle business leaders too saw a new civic center as a means of both enhancing the city’s visibility and boosting the development potential of the downtown core. The planned “Seattle Center” development would both provide a site for a planned 1962 World’s Fair (“Century 21”) and “bolster the central business district, to enable it to hold its own against the rapid growth of suburban areas.”11
But in order to build the facilities for the civic center and fair, Seattle was obliged to turn to the local electorate for approval of general obligation bonds. The $7.5 million bond issue for acquisition of the site north of downtown, a new concert and convention hall, and a multipurpose auditorium was passed in November 1956. That success provided the impetus for a matching $7.5 million appropriation from the state that secured the development of Seattle Center and the World’s Fair complex.
The focus of Seattle and Dallas on efforts to boost private investment and development in the downtown area was common to many large cities in the 1950s and 1960s. The availability of federal urban renewal funds for clearing and rebuilding slums, from the Housing Acts of 1949 and 1954, and the prospect for redeveloping deteriorated zones in and around the core, served as an impetus to a host of convention center development proposals in the decades after World War II. But where these cities succeeded in gaining sufficient voter approval for new meeting facilities, the outcome in other cities was far more problematic. Other cities tried, and often failed, to pass the necessary bond issues.
In mid-1957, Cleveland Mayor Anthony Celebrezze joined the city’s business leaders in promoting a scheme by New York developer William Zeckendorf for a downtown complex of hotel, office buildings, and apartment buildings on the city’s lakefront. But the cornerstone of Zeckendorf’s plan was the construction of a new convention