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 hall, one long sought by downtown business and hospitality interests. And the financing of a new convention center necessarily meant gaining voter approval for general obligation bonds. With great fanfare, the $15 million convention center bond proposal appeared on the city ballot in November 1957. The bonds managed a 52 percent “yes” vote, but fell short of the required 55 percent majority. Mayor Celebrezze and developer Zeckendorf tried again with the same scheme the following year. The “yes” vote slipped slightly, and once again the plan failed.12
With two successive defeats, Zeckendorf gave up on Cleveland and moved on to other cities. But Celebrezze, and more importantly the business leaders of the Greater Cleveland Chamber of Commerce and Cleveland Development Foundation, were unwilling to give up on the promise of a big new convention center and the prospect of anchoring downtown revival with it and the new hotel it would surely draw. The result was a political compromise with the leadership of the city council that involved a less costly convention facility at a different site. With that compromise, a new $10 million convention center plan was put on the ballot in November 1960, and finally succeeded in winning voter approval.13
The route to electoral success was no less rough for 1960s Atlanta. Newly elected mayor Ivan Allen, Jr., and the Chamber of Commerce he had just led as president proposed a new auditorium/convention hall in early 1962. A $10 million civic center bond issue was packaged with other spending proposals for street and sewer improvements and a major new cultural and arts center in Piedmont Park. Despite the unanimity of the city’s white civic leadership and the promise of a broad set of community improvements, the entire bond package of $80 million failed to win voter approval.14
Mayor Allen and the chamber leadership were not willing to give up on the planned auditorium/convention hall, despite the fact that a post-election survey showed only 58 percent of voters willing to support it, compared to 84 percent backing for schools and 79 percent for street or sewer improvements. Allen chose to try again with a convention hall reduced in scale and cost, dropping the bond issue amount from $10 million to $9 million. Submitted to the voters again in May 1963, the convention hall issue passed. But Atlanta was left with an undersized convention facility, with business leaders complaining of its inadequacy shortly after it opened.
The cases of Cleveland and Atlanta suggested that voter support for convention center bonds was not necessarily certain, even with broad backing from business and political leaders including a seemingly popular mayor, the promise of new jobs and development, and the packaging as part of a larger bond program. That fact was certainly evident in 1960s St. Louis. A modest bond proposal for renovating city buildings, including the Kiel Auditorium, on the ballot in January 1962, was defeated. A second attempt later that year met defeat as well. And a 1966 bond issue for expanding the Kiel and adding more exhibit space was also defeated, managing the lowest “yes” vote (54 percent) of the 18 issues on the ballot.
St. Louis faced the unusual problem of having to secure a two-thirds majority under Missouri state law. But it also faced a new set of political and electoral realities during the 1960s, as the coalition of upper-income whites and African American votes that had historically provided the votes to pass major bond issues began to collapse. That change, in turn, reflected a new level of political involvement
