Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 2, 1995 TAG: 9504150007
SECTION: HOTEL ROANOKE PAGE: 16 EDITION: METRO KEITH GRAHAM/STAFF
SOURCE: DAN CASEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The jewel of Roanoke's future economic development strategy is cut, polished and set.
Whaddya do for an encore?
As the renovated hotel and conference center made their debut this weekend, that's a question confronting local officials and economic development wizards.
High on the horizon is an idea floated in the recent past, a convention or trade center somewhere near the hotel.
The idea has been kicked around since the 1980s, when the Hunter Viaduct still dumped traffic onto Jefferson Street, when the city's airport terminal was a throwback to the 1950s, before Explore Park had bought its first square inch of dirt.
While some sort of large convention-style space is still on the table, it's years away if it does get off the ground, officials say.
Its fate rests largely on the success or failure of the $43 million hotel and conference center, said Brian Wishneff, acting director of the Hotel Roanoke and Conference Center Commission.
If the hotel and conference center "goes poorly - and there's no indication that will be the case - it'll be hard to come back and argue in the short term for a need for it," Wishneff said.
"I think [planning] will probably not resume until after the conference center is up and running," said Martha Mackey, executive director of the Roanoke Valley Convention and Visitors Bureau.
The notion of some kind of large, usable space near downtown that can accommodate huge numbers of people was studied three times in the 1980s.
In 1981, the city considered building a convention center along with a new hotel on a site now occupied by the Norfolk Southern Corp. building on Church Avenue at Williamson Road.
That project fell through in part because of fears it would kill the Hotel Roanoke.
The subject resurfaced in 1987 when a consultant estimated that a 65,000-square-foot, $20 million downtown convention center near City Market would inject an estimated $41 million in additional direct and indirect spending into the local economy.
A task force then spent a year looking at convention centers in other cities and trying to find a way to make Roanoke's unique. The group settled on trying to build it around education - a kind of one-stop resource that would turn Roanoke into a magnet for teachers and professors across the county, Wishneff said.
Yet another consultant in 1989 recommended a convention center on the site of the old Norfolk Southern office buildings, just north of the railroad tracks.
However, the plan was put on indefinite hold when Norfolk Southern announced it was closing the historic hotel and deeding it to Virginia Tech.
Then the focus shifted to building a conference center and getting the hotel renovated and reopened.
But the advent of the conference center also has presented a bit of a hitch to the prior proposals: Parts of the new building will duplicate some services offered by a convention center.
"I think we've built some components now that we wouldn't want to duplicate," Wishneff said.
The city still lacks a large exhibition space, Wishneff and Mackey said. But questions of exactly what it will be, where it will go, how much it will cost and who will pay for it are unresolved. And no one is pondering them earnestly - yet.
"We will have a lot of additional meeting space with the conference center, but we really have not addressed exhibit space needs," Mackey said.
City Manager Bob Herbert agrees. He envisions a large, shell-style exhibition hall with concrete floors and 30- to 40-foot ceilings. It would be bigger than the conference center's 15,000-square-foot grand ballroom but not as fancy.
"No chandeliers," Herbert said.
Wishneff said he thinks the exhibit hall ought to be between 60,000 and 80,000 square feet and located near the new hotel.
The only building even close to that size is the Roanoke Civic Center.
Conventions, trade shows and consumer fairs book the civic center for dozens of days and nights each year. In 1994, it hosted 54 such events that drew 145,000 people, manager Bob Chapman said.
Yet, the shows produce relatively small direct revenues for the civic center.
Its 15,000-square-foot exhibit hall is too small for many major exhibitors. Often, their shows spill over into the arena, which incurs huge heating and cooling costs.
Moreover, each time the arena is booked, it ties up dates that might otherwise be used for more lucrative concerts and sporting events for which the arena was designed, Herbert said.
As far as sites go, Wishneff said the old Norfolk Southern buildings still are a possibility. The city has had preliminary discussions with the railroad about acquiring them, but nothing substantive has emerged.
In the meantime, some architecture students at Virginia Tech have floated a plan to preserve the historic structures while renovating the interiors and using part of them as trade center space.
"I think we owe it to ourselves, if that project makes it back on the priority list, to look at that option," Wishneff said.
by CNB