Convention Center Follies. Heywood T. Sanders
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a convention hall, to be built at Columbus Circle. The private corporation also announced the involvement of a public entity, the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, in financing and developing the new “Garden” and an associated garage.62
The role of the Triborough Authority in the proposal was particularly significant. Triborough was the seat of the empire of Robert Moses, who had crafted a reputation as a stellar public official and “master builder” through the Depression years. New York Mayor William O’Dwyer had appointed Moses New York City Construction Coordinator in January 1946, charged with expediting and building a host of public projects outlined in a postwar public works program. An alliance with Moses could make the long-planned convention hall a reality, while avoiding the problems—fiscal and political—posed by direct city involvement in a private project.
The initial plans for the “New Madison Square Garden” had the Triborough Authority providing the financing for what would be a privately operated facility. That financing role in turn required securing approval of the state legislature for an increase in the authority’s debt limit and its new role. The first response in Albany was a firm “no,” with proposed legislation killed in the Assembly’s Ways and Means Committee. New York business leaders and Moses pressed the issue again the following year, and with the backing of Governor Thomas Dewey, won approval for the debt increase. The governor said it would make Mayor O’Dwyer “happy” and predicted “it would make New York again the pre-eminent convention city of the world,” and the city Convention and Visitors Bureau pegged its yield in new visitor spending at $25 million a year.63
The involvement of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority in financing a new arena and convention center complex was at first glance odd. The authority had no particular mandate for such a facility—its purview was transportation. But Moses had gotten a host of public projects built, and had a strong relationship with city business leaders such as Bernard F. Gimbel of Gimbel’s Department Store and Saks Fifth Avenue, as well as bankers and financiers. Indeed, Moses would later recall in his autobiography that “The business community approached the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority to meet this need [for a convention hall] as a matter of public service.” A new complex at Columbus Circle offered the prospect of meeting the city’s convention needs and of spurring the redevelopment of the West Side.64
The Madison Square Garden Corporation eventually pulled out of the project, and the sports arena portion was eliminated. An effort announced by Moses in 1951 to bring both the Metropolitan Opera and the Philharmonic to a new music hall on the site also failed. Moses and Triborough were faced with two problems in developing the convention facility at the site backed by the business leaders. The built-up Columbus Circle location would be expensive to acquire and clear. And the convention hall itself was a money-losing investment. Moses needed some other activity to generate a revenue stream.65
Moses, as head of the city’s Title I slum clearance program, chose to use the new federal urban redevelopment program to acquire the site and “write down” the cost for a new use. But federal restrictions ruled out building a home for the Opera and Philharmonic. The Triborough Authority moved ahead with the “Coliseum” as a new auditorium and convention hall on the Columbus Circle site, pairing it with a 26-story office building that would help subsidize the convention facility. The New York Coliseum opened in April 1956, giving the city some 273,000 square feet of exhibit space and filling the need for a modern convention facility that business leaders had long sought.
By turning to Moses and Triborough, the city managed to secure a new convention center and achieve a major redevelopment goal that neatly avoided any serious conflict over public investment priorities or the kinds of fiscal limits that had stymied earlier initiatives. There was no formal rationale for involving a bridge and tunnel authority in the business of building a coliseum/convention hall. But the authority route offered the opportunity to gain financing outside the city’s debt limit or tax demands, while capitalizing on Robert Moses’s public reputation. It made the new Coliseum appear both “free” and outside the realm of local politics. It also neatly served the interests of a businessman like department store magnate Bernard Gimbel, who served nine terms as head of the city’s Convention and Visitors Bureau, while garnering political support for Moses himself.
The role of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority in getting New York a convention hall also set a strong precedent. When, in March 1970, Mayor John Lindsay announced a plan for the “nation’s largest exhibition center” to be built on Manhattan’s West Side with more than twice the space of the Coliseum, he made it clear that a state public authority would be responsible for financing the $100 million cost. The project’s chief planner noted, “The city itself can’t swallow that cost with its present debt limit.”66
What would ultimately emerge in 1986 as the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, after a series of conflicts over location, design, and financing, would indeed by developed by a new public authority, the New York Convention Center Development Authority, with its bonds issued by the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority and backed by the promise of annual state appropriations. The new Javits Convention Center ended up costing far more—$486 million in total—than the $100 million estimated by Mayor Lindsay in 1970. And the promise that the new convention center would set off a “transformation” of the West Side area has still been unrealized.67
Chicago
When Chicago’s new McCormick Place convention center opened in November 1960, it marked both a major step forward in the city’s competitive position and a striking innovation in terms of governance and finance. The big new convention center was financed by a state tax on horseracing, rather than a local tax or as a general obligation. And the center was owned by a new public entity, the Metropolitan Fair and Exposition Authority. The new authority was created by state legislation and overseen by a 14-member board of directors jointly appointed by the Illinois governor and the mayor of Chicago, with both the mayor and the governor as ex officio members.
The financing and structure of McCormick Place were not happenstance. They represented a means of getting Chicago a new convention hall after decades of political failure, effectively crafted by the leadership of the Chicago Tribune to generate funding outside the political and fiscal limits on Chicago and Cook County, while effectively insulating (at least in theory) the project from the depths of Chicago politics.
Edward Banfield provided a history of the origins of McCormick Place in his 1961 study, Political Influence. He describes the initiative of Tribune publisher Col. Robert McCormick to provide for a permanent lakefront fair, replacing the temporary Railroad Fairs that had taken place in 1948 and 1949: “The Colonel, however, was determined. He told W. Don Maxwell, his managing editor, to work the problem out one way or another.” Maxwell’s choice of a tax that involved state government is seamless in Banfield’s telling: “Maxwell had no doubt about where the needed subsidy should come from … [a tax] on parimutuel betting at horse races.”68
Maxwell and the Tribune might well have sought some alternative revenue source, perhaps from city or county governments, for their fair plans. But the Tribune had, in George Tagge, its state house reporter at the capital in Springfield, someone with a broad set of connections in the legislature and a political environment where the newspaper had significant clout. Tagge recalled in a 1984 oral history interview how the horse track taxes had come to serve Col. McCormick’s goal of a lakefront fair, and the eventual larger purpose of a permanent convention and trade hall, from a conversation he had in May 1951:
So one day the place wasn’t in session and I stopped at the desk of Paul Powell, then the Democratic majority leader and a fairly good news source…. So I said, “Well, you know, Cook County doesn’t get a damn thing out of that [racing tax revenue]…. And he, partly because he was so happy at the time, I think—I said, “Well, we’ve got this problem up in Chicago. We had this lakefront fair and Maxwell has been out with his hat in his hand … collecting money…. Why couldn’t something—couldn’t there be a bill that would put on—I don’t want to touch your dole or the county fairs, but the parallel of that for Cook County which would be used for lakefront fair building?” And Paul, a man of action, said, “Well, what the hell.