Grand schemes never seem to die. So former New York City deputy mayor Dan Doctoroff is back with a plan for scrapping Manhattan’s Jacob K Javits Convention Center and building an entirely new convention center in the middle of the Sunnyside Yards in Queens. Doctoroff’s op-ed pulled out the standard expansive booster rhetoric: “We are an undisputed leader in tourism, yet we lag badly in one important aspect: the huge convention and conference business.” And as for the Javits Center itself, well “It’s too small for many events and can’t compete with facilities in other cities.” And the price tag for a new center with double the space of the Javits, conveniently located in Queens? A mere $8 billion. Doctoroff offers the reassuring news that it would really be free: “But the beauty of this plan is that it can all be financed at no new net cost to taxpayers.” The fiscal magic would be performed by a sale of the existing Javits property, and all the new “incremental” tax revenues from the development boom around the Sunnyside Yards and the former Javits site.
The notion of a big new convention center in Queens isn’t new. Bob Yaro of the Regional Plan Association has been pushing the idea for years. And in his January 2012 “State of the State” address, Gov. Andrew Cuomo flogged a plan for the biggest convention center in the country to be by the Genting Organization gaming firm at Aqueduct Racetrack. For the politicos, NYC deserves something akin to the biggest.
Doctoroff (and Yaro and Cuomo before) neatly managed to avoid the realities of the convention business in New York and the rest of the country. The Javits has been hemorrhaging business for years, with convention and tradeshow attendance down from 1.25 million in 2000 to 817,100 in pre-recession 2007, and then just 595,300 last year. It’s been much the same at what is now the biggest center in the country, Chicago’s McCormick Place. There convention business has fallen from 1.44 million in 2000 to 863,773 last year. Even that has taken millions in public incentives and discounts to lure events, a necessity in an overbuilt buyer’s market.
The promise that a new center can be financed for free, with the tax revenues from adjacent development, has a familiar ring. When Mayor John Lindsay first promoted what would become the Javits in 1970, it was touted as the “first step in the redevelopment of the west midtown area,” part of a “transformation” of the West Side that would include a crosstown subway or “people mover” direct to the center, a “major new center” of high rise offices, and new hotels and restaurants, supported by the flood of new convention visitors. Didn’t quite work out that way.