Convention Center Follies. Heywood T. Sanders
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of building new and larger centers, they have proven remarkably unsuccessful in filling them. From Atlanta to Seattle, Boston to Las Vegas, the promises of local officials and the forecasts of consultants have come up short. State and local governments have built modern new centers, only to see half or less of the convention attendees promised by the consultants. Other cities have expanded their existing centers, yet failed to see any consistent increase in business. Indeed, there is substantial evidence that the supply of convention center space substantially exceeds demand (a “buyer’s market”), with cities desperately competing by offering their center space rent free.
Why have cities and other state and local governments invested billions in convention center building when the actual results, in terms of new convention attendees, visitors, and economic impact, are quite limited or nonexistent? Why do local officials from Anaheim to Washington make convention centers, and tourism generally, such a signal public priority even as they cut back on public services and essential public facilities?
For some observers, such as economist Edward Glaeser, these investments amount to a misplaced set of public priorities on the part of elected officials, an “edifice error” exemplified by Detroit’s spending on an arena and a downtown People Mover. Glaeser argues, “Too many officials in troubled cities wrongly imagine that they can lead their city back to its former glories with some massive construction project—a new stadium or light rail system, a convention center or a housing project.” Correct as Glaeser’s observation is, it emphasizes the question of why convention centers and stadiums, a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, or a new aquarium routinely rise to preeminence as local policy priorities. Some observers have stressed the local interests that directly benefit from public building—architects, consulting engineers, contractors, and construction labor unions—as well as the gain for politicians who “get to cut ribbons.” Others have pointed to the combination of local hospitality and tourism interests—hotels and restaurants, the convention and visitors bureau—with local policy entrepreneurs and larger national tourism interests and promoters.
The analysis that follows seeks to answer the why question, first by reviewing the metropolitan “arms race” that has propelled the massive expansion in convention center space around the country over the last two decades, and second by examining the genesis of this contemporary arms race through the historical experience of convention center development in three key locations: Chicago, Atlanta, and St. Louis. Unlike academic research that has focused on the visible, public side of large-scale public investment—the mayoral announcements, the newspaper headlines, the formal consultant reports—this work is focused on the interests and intent of local business and civic leaders. Those business leaders—the heads of major local banks and financial institutions, utilities, department stores, and local developers—have long played crucial roles in setting local capital investment and development priorities and in promoting convention center development. For them, the import of convention center development—and often public stadium and sports facility building—lies in the ability of public investment to shape land use and development opportunities.
These business leaders have been motivated not by promised “economic impact” but instead by concern with downtown property values, “protection from erosion,” and the place of “anchors.” Facing a combination of exploding suburban development and stagnant downtown cores in the 1950s, they sought—in the words of Chicago Title and Trust’s Holman Pettibone—dramatic public projects that would serve the “obvious need to bolster the downtown business district.” Moreover, the planners who worked for these business leaders recommended convention center development on sites that would remove “blighted conditions… detrimental to commercial development possibilities” in the downtown core, serve the necessity to “anchor the Loop securely,” and provide a “healthy fringe to Downtown.” The larger imperative for convention center development was thus one of land use and property value, fully focused on the downtown center.
The land use and property value focus of business leaders was not limited to just a convention center, or to one particular zone of downtown. A stadium or arena, a university campus or research center might well serve much the same goal of “anchoring” or “protecting.” Indeed, the imperative to serve different downtown business and property interests, interests often divided into “factions” or “sections,” divisions that demonstrated an “unhealthy rivalry,” necessarily demanded multiple public development projects. Those projects, spread across “factions” and “sections,” also served a broader collective purpose.
Yet even as local business leaders sought to “bolster” and “anchor” all of downtown with public projects, they faced increasingly uncooperative local electorates. Atlanta voters expressed strong reluctance to a convention center scheme in 1962, although they did approve a less costly project the following year. But by the end of the 1960s, business leaders across the country faced angry voters, as well as the related problem of “white flight.” St. Louis saw a 31.7 percent decrease in its white population from 1960 to 1970. For Atlanta, it was a 20 percent drop. That population loss both reduced the market for downtown retail, and also marked the departure of the middle-income population that had long supported major public investment bond issues.
The imperative to boost downtown development and create a sense of “momentum” did not evaporate for big-city business leaders during the 1960s and 1970s. Rather, it led them to focus on new fiscal schemes that could build grand convention centers, stadiums, and arenas independent of city fiscal resources or the preferences of city voters. In this period, Atlanta, Baltimore, St. Louis, Kansas City, Philadelphia, Boston, and Seattle all turned to their state governments as a source of public investment and finance. Even as downtown department stores like Atlanta’s Rich’s, St. Louis’s Scruggs Vandervoort and Barney, and Baltimore’s Hochschild Kohn closed their doors, the business leaders in these cities pressed for new public development projects that could serve as “anchors” and “sparks” for new private investment.
In 1954, Holman Pettibone could tell Chicago’s mayor and his business colleagues of the imperative for a major public project—the “obvious need to bolster the downtown business district.” Almost 50 years later, his counterpart in St. Louis, Bank of America’s David Darnell, would tell his colleagues that in order to “make the St. Louis region world class,” it “requires that the downtown area thrives.” That common quest to bolster the downtown business district, to assure that downtown thrives even as the larger city has declined or suffered, has been the central driver of convention center development in big American cities. And so even as centers fail to produce, as promised jobs, economic development, and private investment fail to appear, the calls from mayors and governors, from bankers and corporate CEOs for more public spending—and a new set of plans and consultant studies—come once again.
PART I
The Race to Build
Chapter 1
Building Boom
In 1982, Chicago’s McCormick Place stood at the apex of the nation’s convention centers. With 825,000 square feet of exhibit space in the main facility and another 330,000 square feet in nearby Donnelly Hall, it easily surpassed the convention halls of other cities. It routinely hosted the largest collection of major conventions and tradeshows each year, with 24 of the nation’s 150 largest events in 1982 and 27 in 1983, “dominating over two-thirds of the 15 largest events.”1 The list included such blockbuster events as the International Machine Tool Show with 97,000 attendees in 1983, the National Restaurant Association Show (87,000), the National Hardware Show (84,000), and the summer Consumer Electronics Show (72,000).
But Chicago’s record of tradeshow success did little to dampen the competition from other cities, and the early 1980s saw a growing list of large, new convention facilities. Las Vegas was adding a major expansion to its convention center, bringing its exhibit hall space to 759,000 square feet—not much smaller than the lakefront building of McCormick Place. New York City was in the process of constructing what would be the Jacob Javits Convention Center, with 700,000 prime square feet of exhibit space, and some 200,000 additional square feet of flexible event space. Then there were new, albeit smaller centers