RALEIGH - With 200-foot construction cranes looming behind the band on stage, Raleigh native Mike Saulter stood on a Fayetteville Street sidewalk, listening to live salsa and hoping the music keeps playing downtown.

"It brings Raleigh alive," he said. "When I was a kid, I came downtown because there were stores and parades and all that. Since they're revitalizing downtown, there's a reason to come downtown."

City leaders are promising that those cranes are harbingers of more people coming downtown -- thousands of them, and all for the same reasons -- whether it's the World Burn Congress in 2008 or the National Genealogical Society in 2009. Those two groups are already booked for the new Raleigh Convention Center and more than 4,000 hotel nights at nearby hotels.

Raleigh Wide Open 2 -- the festival on Fayetteville Street which ended with the return of the Sir Walter Raleigh statue late Saturday night -- was the second annual celebration of a new downtown. Organizers couldn't have ordered a mellower July day: a high of 83 and low humidity.

As the music played on Fayetteville Street, David Wiest, project executive with Barnhill Contracting Co., led a media tour of parts of the convention center under construction a block away.

About 65 percent complete, the 500,000-square-foot building is just skin and bones. The blond brick and limestone facade is affixed in places, and an exposed steel skeleton gives the building a solid but unfinished look.

The gigantic windows and skylights that will eventually define the open, daylit style of the facility are still missing their glass.

But a visitor cannot miss the sheer size of the underground exhibit hall -- 150,000 square feet with a ceiling reaching higher than four stories and room for up to 800 exhibitors.

One could fit about 50 large homes inside the hall -- a possibility that Wiest would not rule out, say, if the National Association of Homebuilders were to book a convention.

The ceiling trusses are 34 feet from the floor, and something taller -- maybe the peak of a model home's roof -- could reach as high as 45 feet between heating and cooling ducts and other mechanical systems above the trusses.

"They may erect a three- or four-story house here," said Wiest.

No indoor houses are planned yet, but more than 70 statewide, national and even international conferences have already reserved the center. It is scheduled to open late next summer.

In the past 12 months, private developers or government officials have committed to investing more than $1.3 billion downtown.

About $479 million in public spending will pay for several building and streetscape projects, including the $220 million convention center paid for through city and county rooms and meals taxes.

Saulter celebrated the new convention center Saturday night. But he wants more for Raleigh: more street festivals with more vendors, more street performers and community organizations. An amusement park like Carowinds wouldn't hurt either.

"I just wish they had put the RBC Center downtown," he said. "Then we would be a lively city. We'd be like Charlotte."