fundamental conflict over center location was not about technical planning questions or issues of accessibility or land cost. Rather, it was over gaining (or potentially losing) the benefits a major public investment could have for urban space. The promise of a new or bigger convention facility was that it would draw thousands of new visitors and millions of their dollars to the city—what Cleveland Plain Dealer editorial writers termed “the convention pot o’ gold” in 1956. That flood of visitors would spur the development of new hotels, restaurants, and shops. But while local hotel owners and newspaper publishers might all agree on the great benefits for the community at large or even for downtown, much of that boost would be narrower, limited to the immediate environs of the new convention hall. That meant that property interests or developers focused on one area of the city or the downtown would not necessarily embrace a new convention facility somewhere else.35
A number of geographically distinct business groups in Chicago—the West Central Association, the North Central Association, the South Side Planning Board—each sought the convention center in its own area to bolster land values and encourage new development. Boston’s War Memorial (later Hynes) Auditorium, opened in early 1965, was part of the new Prudential Center development on the site of the former Boston & Albany rail yards in Back Bay, intended to support new hotel and retail construction. The goals of convention center building also went beyond encouraging and supporting new development to altering the character and potential of land in or near downtown.36
When the Los Angeles Times editorialized about the civic benefits of a new convention hall in 1953, it noted that the proposed downtown location was “in a somewhat dilapidated state,” and the buildings’ “removal would improve the area and cause a sprucing up of neighboring structures.” And when in 1954 the leaders of the Chicago Planning Commission and Land Clearance Commission joined a group of leading business leaders to consider the Fort Dearborn development proposal for the area north of the downtown Loop, mayoral adviser James Downs noted the possibility of building a new convention hall at the south end of the Loop, arguing that “a large scale redevelopment at this site would tend to balance Fort Dearborn and anchor the Loop securely.”37
Writing in his pioneering volume Principles of City Land Values in 1924, Richard M. Hurd had concluded,
To summarize, the effect of public buildings, if located at or near the old business centre they tend to maintain central strength in their first location, as in Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Chicago. This is the normal case. The first exception would be where public buildings are located at a moderate distance from the centre, where the tendency is to draw business in their direction.38
For planners and real estate experts such as James Downs, Hurd’s assessment tapped the potential role of a new convention center in shaping land use and development. A new facility might serve as an “anchor” for the existing central business district. Located on the edge of the downtown core, it could serve as a bulwark against adjacent areas in decline.
For Atlanta’s Metropolitan Planning Commission in 1952, the potential of a new civic center with a “large convention auditorium” was that it could eliminate “one of Atlanta’s worst slums…. a definite menace to the future health of the downtown area.” The Planning Commission two years later would suggest a “new convention auditorium” at a different site, as part of the “development of space above and immediately adjacent to the railroad gulch,” where it would aid the development of new office buildings, a new department store, and an 800 to 1,000-room hotel.39
The two conflicting Atlanta plans pointed up the political problem of siting and building a new “convention auditorium.” Built as part of a slum clearance and urban renewal project east of the downtown core, it might remove a “menace.” As part of the “air rights” over the gulch on the opposite side of the core, it promised to act as “magnet” for new investment and private development. But Atlanta could not necessarily afford one convention center, let alone two.
The solution for Atlanta, as it would be for any number of other cities, was a combination of multiple public projects in a single deal that could serve the distinct parts of the downtown core. Many of the east side “slums” described in the 1952 plan were in fact wiped out through the federal urban renewal program, providing a site for that “convention auditorium,” the Atlanta Civic Center. The railroad gulch would receive its own public project a few years later, in the form of a new coliseum/arena, promoted by one of the city’s major developers as the kind of magnet that could support his planned private development.
Atlanta’s voters first turned down the Civic Center bond proposal in 1962. A smaller scheme was approved the following year. But when local business leaders sought to construct an Intercontinental Congress Center in the late 1960s, they avoided city government and its voters. They turned instead to the Georgia state legislature. When the new Atlanta Coliseum was planned and developed in the late 1960s, it too was financed in a fashion that avoided any public vote.
With the fundamental deals for convention center building structured first within the local business community, only emerging into public view when set, and financing arrangements arranged to avoid or limit any direct public vote, the politics of center development has been effectively reshaped since the 1960s and 1970s. The final element in sustaining the convention center boom has been the set of promises—of visitor activity, spending, job creation, and economic impact—that have singularly privileged center development as a public investment.
Economic Impact
The fiscal reconstruction of convention center finance and politics has been accompanied by a parallel shift in the rhetoric of purpose and promise. The convention halls and civic centers of the first half of the twentieth century were commonly justified as amenities for the broad urban community, capable of hosting large community events as well as conventions, and accommodating large local gatherings as well as the occasional national political convention or major event. In 1923, St. Louis voters approved a $5 million bond issue for a “Municipal Auditorium and Community Center.” Cleveland voters overwhelmingly approved the bonds for a “Public Auditorium” in 1916. Los Angeles civic and business leaders promoted a new “War Memorial Auditorium” in 1920 as a “living monument” to the city’s servicemen and “large enough for any indoor spectacle.”40
Beginning in the years after World War II, cities began to promote the idea of luring major national convention and tradeshow events, often accompanied by the imperative to lure national political conventions. By the 1980s and 1990s, the rhetoric had come to center on the notion of “economic impact.” The flow of new out-of-town visitors to the conventions, accommodated by a new or larger venue, would yield a growing stream of spending, visitor dollars that would be multiplied throughout the local economy. Spending by hotel guests would be re-spent by hotel employees; wages of restaurant workers and retail employees supported by new visitors would be spent on other local goods and services, magnifying the economic impact.
The increased volume of visitor spending, over a three- or four-day average stay, would in turn boost local tax revenues. Hotel and restaurant spending would produce new hotel occupancy and sales tax revenue, and increased visitor business would ultimately support new development around the convention center, development that would produce new property tax revenues. By the early 1980s, arguments that a new or expanded center would produce economic benefits were a staple of consultant studies, with forecast amounts stated with striking specificity.
Convention centers have thus come to be justified as “loss leaders.” Local convention and visitors bureaus (CVBs) and center promoters acknowledge that almost every convention center in the U.S. operates at a loss, not even counting the annual cost in debt service. Centers simply do not take in revenues equal to the cost of operation. In fiscal 2011, the operating loss of Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Convention Center was $18.1 million. Washington’s
