Consultants had blessed the idea with their charts and multiplying factors. The city's political and business elites had endorsed the bonds. The News & Observer's leadership supported the proposal.

But the author of the paper's "Urban Image" column, on the job roughly six months, demurred.

"Raleigh needs a new convention center," he wrote the Sunday before the election. "Someday.

"Right now, it needs other things, including more people living downtown and a downtown that is more livable."

It would be pleasant to reflect that I single-handedly brought down that convention center, but as I noted in the same column, the referendum defeat was "expected."

Indeed, while voters elsewhere elevated William Jefferson Clinton to the presidency, in Wake County they scotched the convention center bonds. The city instead expanded the Raleigh Civic and Convention Center, which sat athwart the pedestrian mall that once had been the city's prized main axis.

But mall that is old shall be new again -- cars troll Fayetteville Street as they did before Raleigh had a Beltline. Crossing, you again see the Capitol at one end and Memorial Auditorium -- make that the Progress Energy Center for the Performing Arts -- at the other.

For the Raleigh Civic and Convention Center, the modernist flattop renovated and expanded to the tune of $14 million a little more than a decade ago is no more. Condominiums have sprouted in and around downtown Raleigh, along with restaurants and taverns and nightclubs.

And lo, a new, $221 million center opens this week. The new Raleigh Convention Center is appealing but relatively modest for a 500,000-square-foot building.

The center's architects -- Atlanta's TVS & Associates, a national leader in convention center design, and area firms O'Brien/Atkins Associates and Clearscapes -- sunk its huge exhibits hall below grade, literally lowering the massive project's profile.

"In the hierarchy of important buildings," says architect Steven Schuster of Clearscapes, "a convention center is not at top of the list. ... Personally, I think it ought to be a little bit on the quiet side."

On the noisier side, the new convention center comes with an embedded work of public art that has already generated plenty of buzz, the shimmer wall.

Conditions are favorable

Will the center fulfill its promises of visitors and urban vitality, though?

The economic slump aside, it looks as if the conditions I spelled out 16 years ago have been met. Raleigh's downtown has people living in it and it has become a more appealing destination.

The other issue I raised then, the lack of hotel rooms, seems on the way to being resolved, too, with the addition of the 400-room Marriott City Center, across Salisbury Street from the convention center and next to the 353-room Raleigh Sheraton.

Now for the "But." The credit crunch has delayed about 500 hotel rooms planned for downtown, keeping the convention center from luring major events for which it was built. It cannot attract large meetings on the mere promise that rooms will be there.

Behind this, though, lies a more significant question about the value of a convention center.

In general, convention centers add little vitality to the streets around them. They can be used for local events, but they are built more for visitors. And they cost more to run than they earn.

The argument for them holds that they generate revenue for hotels and restaurants, and thus tax receipts, but still they usually operate at a deficit. For most convention centers, the eventual numbers rarely match the early promises.

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