Recent comments in /f/philadelphia

urbantravelsPHL t1_jblk5zi wrote

Reply to Was the Convention Center a good idea? by Victorzaroni

If you are a newish resident most of your Convention Center knowledge is apparently from the pandemic era. So yeah, it was 100% empty during the pandemic, and it's taken a while to ramp back up to normal business.

I think rather than going by how it "feels" to you at street level, you might want to look at some actual figures about number and size of events that are held there. The flower show, the car show, these are things that locals attend and are not representative; they don't bring in the hotel business.

25

MikeDPhilly t1_jblk5ez wrote

Reply to comment by GreyAardvark in New Market? What is this place now? by GreyAardvark

For me looking back, it's amazing how quickly New Market went downhill. I think it took less than a decade from opening to failure. That was one of the hottest areas of development in the mid to late 70s; had it thrived, the South Street corridor would have looked a lot different by the 2000s.

3

Skootdaloot92 t1_jblk0pg wrote

Reply to Was the Convention Center a good idea? by Victorzaroni

Unfortunately, it’s usually empty because Philadelphia is a difficult city to hold an event. This is a Union strong city which means it’s unreasonably expensive to work in. I know the tradeshow industry I manage avoids Philadelphia and other Union strong cities for that reason. Not the only reason, but it’s a big factor.

−14

urbantravelsPHL t1_jbljoiz wrote

Reply to comment by hdhcnsnd in Was the Convention Center a good idea? by Victorzaroni

You're thinking of events which draw in primarily locals, which are not the norm at the Convention Center. The Flower Show does bring in some people from outside the area who stay at hotels, but not that many compared to the really massive medical and scientific conferences that draw from all over the US and worldwide.

10

urbantravelsPHL t1_jbljgld wrote

Reply to comment by mistersausage in Was the Convention Center a good idea? by Victorzaroni

this is the same discussion we've had about the proposed arena and whether it should also have a high rise building stacked on top of it.

The answer is that, for structural engineering reasons, you cannot stack a high-rise on top of a huge clear span roof.* A huge clear span roof has enough to do holding itself up. This is why you don't have arenas and large convention centers on the ground floor of high rise buildings.

*edit for clarity - I shouldn't speak of the convention center as having a "large clear span roof" as it certainly doesn't, in the manner that a large sports arena does. There are columns in the space. But it is still not the type of space you can easily place on the ground floors of a tall high-rise.

​

I can think of a few big city hotels with quite large ballrooms as part of their meeting space, but even those are generally not right under the tall towers. (I'm thinking of the Marriott Marquis in San Francisco, where I saw Mikhail Gorbachev in 199? give a talk with alllll the ballrooms opened up and an audience of about 2000....that portion of the building is not underneath the hotel tower.)

20