By Steve Rhodes
With McCormick Place cycling back into the news lately, I thought it would be a good time to go back and take a look at the piece I wrote while at Chicago magazine about the convention complex in October 2004. It’s not online (sigh), so I’ll just present excerpts here. I’ve left out sections on political scandals at McCormick Place as well as Mob ties, how trade shows are arranged and set up, and some of the color gleaned from the month when I went to every show I could there. Instead, I’ve tried to streamline the story here to what seems most relevant today. The piece was called “The Toughest Game In Town.”
*
One morning last spring, 200 or so people gathered in a parking lot on the Near South Side to celebrate the groundbreaking for an $850-million expansion of the McCormick Place convention center. Under a white tent, the Eddie Harrison Jump Stars Orchestra entertained, while guests sampled from buffets of fancy snacks – vanilla creme-filled profiteroles with a dark chocolate glaze, lemon meringue tartlets, and cracked telly-cherry peppercorn infused long-stem strawberries with creme fraiche.
The waitstaff wore black uniforms and white gloves. Souvenir paperweights filled one table; a model of the new building sat on another. Television personality Bill Kurtis emceed the event, championing the “growth of an industry that has helped define our town for decades – the convention and visitors industry.” Leticia Peralta Davis, who was chief executive officer of the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority is in charge of McCormick Place, promised a grand future. “On this very site, for decades to come, new products will be unveiled, new inventions that will make the technology of our era seem primitive by comparison,” she said. The addition, she vowed, would even have transformative powers: “Take my word,” she said. “The neighborhoods around us will be reshaped and reborn, in architecture, in culture, and commerce, thanks to a burst of energy that will grow outward from this innovative new building.” In all, the morning was filled with the kind of civic boosterism that accompanies huge projects, years in the making, that are expected to generate hundreds of millions of dollars for the city.
Convention officials needed the good vibe. The groundbreaking came amid a flurry of bad news for McCormick Place. The expansion had already been tainted by bid-rigging charges involving the project’s main contractor and Scott Fawell, Davis’s predecessor. Fawell is now passing time in a South Dakota prison, having been convicted on a wide range of fraudulent schemes he perpetrated while working in the secretary of state’s office. The Chicago Sun-Times had recently reported on union workers with Mob links who continued to plague the convention center. McCormick Place was already operating at a deficit, and Davis had already laid off 15 percent of the work force (116 jobs, including 13 unfilled positions) the previous summer. The exposition authority was still coping with the loss of its $5-million annual state subsidy, and a chunk of state funding for the city’s convention and tourism bureau was in danger during the latest budget battle in Springfield. A fight was heating up over convention costs and union work rules – thought to be costing the city business – that within days would be joined by the mayor and the governor. And, as if to rub salt in the wounds, the National Hardware Show, which left Chicago after 28 years due to a precipitous decline in attendance, had just held its first event in Las Vegas, and it was a smashing success.
“We’ve living in a brutally nasty competitive environment,” says Heywood Sanders, a public administration professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio, and a leading expert in the convention industry. “And it’s not clear that adding space gets new business.”
Read More
Posted on January 6, 2010
