Keystone in place for downtown Raleigh

$221 million building is designed to attract visitors

RALEIGH -- When Raleigh's new convention center opens Friday, it will instantly become a building burdened by great expectations.

As the most debated and expensive part of the city's downtown revitalization effort, the center will test whether the city that's a perennial on "best place to live" lists can also rank as a great place to meet.

"It means a lot," said Roger Krupa, the convention center's director. "If this doesn't work, I think we're going to be in recovery mode for a while."

The center's ribbon-cutting at noon Friday will kick off a two-day celebration featuring Chuck Berry and 29 other music acts performing on two

stages along Fayetteville Street.

The first visitors arrive Sept. 11, when up to 2,500 attendees of the National Agents Alliance National Leadership Conference descend on the city. In its first three months of operation, the center expects visitors to account for more than 20,000 hotel-room nights.

The opening meeting will be the first direct return on investment for Mayor Charles Meeker and other city and Wake County officials who have spent millions of taxpayer dollars to create a vibrant downtown. That investment includes Raleigh's $20 million contribution toward construction of the 400-room Marriott City Center hotel adjacent to the center.

"This is really a milestone for our community," Meeker said. "The convention center will restore Raleigh as one of the premier meeting places in the Southeast."

With its sloping windows and "shimmer wall" facing McDowell Street, the $221 million convention center is widely considered a beautiful building.

Whether it is considered successful will depend on who uses it. When it was first proposed in 2003, the building was hailed by city and county leaders as an economic engine that would generate $1.4 billion in direct spending over the next three decades.

To deliver, the center will need to consistently bring in outside visitors who spend money at local hotels, shops and restaurants.

That is something the old convention center did not do. Before it closed in September 2005, the old center had become a place that primarily hosted locally attended car, boat and home shows.

"There was no convention business," said Krupa, 60, who has run Raleigh's convention center since 1980.

Debate: Will it work?

For years, Raleigh and Wake County politicians debated whether building a new convention center would make the city attractive to out-of-towners. Opponents argued that a new facility was not the answer, particularly because Raleigh would be competing against more glamorous cities that had the same idea.

"Basically, it was a matter of Raleigh is just not a city that can attract people for conventions," said Russell Capps, president of the Wake County Taxpayers Association.

Capps' association was been a constant critic of spending taxpayers' money on a new center. In 1992, the association helped defeat a $95 million bond referendum by driving two sound trucks around Raleigh that warned people the city wanted to raise their taxes to buy something that wouldn't work.

Although Capps admits the new convention center is nice, he's still not convinced it will end up being a wise investment.

"What I hope is that it won't be a white elephant," Capps said. "But we fear it will."

Downtown transformed

Supporters of the convention center note that a lot has changed in Raleigh since 1992. A once-moribund downtown has been brought back to life by the reopening of Fayetteville Street to vehicular traffic and the addition of a small but growing number of restaurants and bars. According to the Downtown Raleigh Alliance, 53 bars, restaurants and nightclubs have opened downtown since the beginning of 2006.