Mayor Michael Bloomberg may have accepted the defeat of his proposed football stadium and convention center on the far West Side of Manhattan, but that doesn't mean he has to like it.
"Why don't we build an addition to the Javits Center?" he said in a recent interview. "That is what the convention business needs--a very big, flexible space. And, as a matter of fact, if we could get somebody who would pay for the whole thing in return for maybe using it 13 Sundays in the fall, wouldn't that be a great thing for New York City?"
The mayor's tongue may have been firmly in his cheek, but there is no question many of the state's powerful business and political interests are fed up with the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, the 675,000 square-foot boxy pyramid-shaped convention space adjacent to the Hudson Yards development site. Too small, too hard to get to, too expensive to renovate.
For an example of a convention center done right, Bloomberg says look no further than Chicago, with its 6 million-square-foot McCormick Place convention center.
"You could fit the Javits Center inside the McCormick center and they'd still have plenty of room for conventions," the mayor groused. "We are hopelessly behind."
The desire for a new convention center permeates the top levels of New York's city and state government. Robert Steel, Bloomberg's deputy mayor for economic development, is said to be interested in building a new space. So is Pat Foye, Gov. Andrew Cuomo's recent pick to head the Port Authority, which has taken charge of the Moynihan Station project to turn the post office near the Javits Center into a train station.
"It could be a good legacy project for Cuomo--a massive construction project like a convention center would create tens of thousands of short-term construction jobs," said one labor operative.
Javits was headed toward an overhaul before the Great Recession derailed that plan. In 2008 then Gov. David Paterson, citing the rising costs of construction, downgraded Javits' $1.7 billion expansion to a mere $465 million renovation project.
But business leaders, tourism experts and city officials have serious doubts the renovation will make Javits any more palatable to those large-scale marquee events that the city wants to attract, like the trade shows that fill convention centers in Chicago and Las Vegas.
At a recent meeting of New York City's regional economic development council, the Regional Plan Association made the case for selling and demolishing Javits and splitting the city's convention space between two locations. Hope Cohen, a director at RPA, said such a plan would generate about $4 billion to redevelop Moynihan Station as compact Manhattan convention space and build a much larger convention center elsewhere, like Willets Point in Queens.
"Recognize the different functionalities, and separate them," Cohen said. "This would capture not only high-end conferences that we might be already getting in New York but, more importantly, the conferences that we're not getting in New York because we have no such facility...like the three-day conventions for the [American Medical Association] or the Lung Association that have been going to other cities."
But without enough money to build, many believe the plan won't get much further than the drawing table.
"I think it's over and done with," Bloomberg said. "We've built a lot of the things around there. The space is now dedicated to office buildings. It's going to be built over the rail yards."
Still, the temptation remains.
"The McCormick center in Chicago is an enormous percentage of Chicago's business," Bloomberg mused, "and if we had that, a lot of that business would come here."
