Visitors Like Convention Center’s Look

The San Diego Convention Center had been open Friday to the public for all of 23 minutes--more than enough time for Jim Hand, a Fallbrook contractor, to form his professional assessment.

“It’s impressive,” Hand said after walking around the cavernous interior of the $160-million complex with his wife, Beverly.

“But I think there’s a lot more work to do, and it really is opening prematurely,” Hand said.

“The carpet’s not done, the building’s not finished, the baseboards aren’t up in the lobby and the planters aren’t planted. But it will be a beautiful building.”

“It is a beautiful building,” Beverly Hand said. “This is a great day to be here, and a great day for San Diego, to be here with the opening and all these people.”

Though the floor was indeed bare in places, rows of phone banks were phoneless, glass doors were missing their glass and there were buckets and ladders everywhere, the center did, indeed, formally open at noon Friday, as Convention Center Corp. officials had promised.

Thousands of San Diego-area residents trooped downtown to the center--by car, by trolley and by free shuttle--to take part, along with politicians and picketers, in the celebration.

Like the Hands, many noted the work to be done. But, like them, civic pride tended to carry the day.

“I love it. It’s great,” said Margy Doughty of La Mesa. “It’s super-looking, outside and inside, too.”

“I just wanted to see what San Diego had to offer in the new convention center,” said Audrey Jackson, who lives in San Diego’s Paradise Hills neighborhood. “I think it’ll bring a lot of money to town.”

Civic leaders by the score attended the late-morning ceremony--outside the front of the center on Harbor Drive--at which the San Diego Unified Port District officially turned the center over to the city.

Built entirely with Port District funds, the center--the largest and most expensive project ever attempted by a local government in San Diego County--will be leased to the city for 20 years at $1 a year.

San Diego Mayor Maureen O’Connor presented Louis M. Wolfsheimer, chairman of the Board of Port Commissioners, with a $20 bill, saying she wanted to “continue the tradition” of keeping the building separate from taxpayer funds.

The ceremony, though festive and spirited, was not without controversy.

During the ceremony, about 2 dozen people demonstrated loudly and carried signs protesting the Port District’s decision last summer not to name the center for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the slain civil-rights leader.

“Welcome to the White Peoples’ Convention Center,” one sign said.

Members of the San Diego Newspaper Guild, locked in a lengthy contract battle with Copley Press, publisher of the San Diego Union and the San Diego Tribune, handed out leaflets asking for support.

Meanwhile, the ceremony originally had included the release of “thousands of colorful balloons.” But San Diego Audubon Society spokeswoman Alice DeBolt called the center Friday morning to protest the balloon release, saying the society didn’t want to be seen as “hostile” but warning that the plan wasn’t ecologically sound.

Alm said Friday afternoon that the balloon release plan had been scrapped in favor of a more extensive fireworks show Friday night, but that DeBolt’s calls were not the reason.

Long before the calls, Alm said, center officials realized that the crowd in front of the building, wouldn’t be able to see the balloons take off, since they were to be released from the center’s terraces in back.

Arches of blue, white and green balloons on the speakers’ platform were taken inside after the ceremony, Alm said.

“It isn’t our goal to upset the ecology of San Diego,” Alm said. “We understand that there was a problem with the balloons, and we respect that.”

Besides, the balloon issue quickly gave way to the hot dog crisis, Alm said. After the ceremony ended, and the doors to the center were flung open, thousands of people poured in, so many that one of the concession stands ran out of hot dogs within 20 minutes, Alm said.

“But it was restocked 10 minutes later,” she said.

Admission to the center was free, the first day of what center officials had billed as a weekend-long “Community Celebration.” Center officials predicted the three-day open house might draw as many as 160,000 people, but Alm said she would not know how many people flooded the center Friday until gate counts were tabulated Sunday night.

Union Bank officials, who were inside by the main doors handing out a free poster of the center, said they figured Friday to give away out 30,000 posters, said Cathy Bridge, an assistant vice president at the bank.

The 2,000 parking stalls under the center were nowhere near filled as Friday afternoon proceeded, said Robert R. Laser, executive vice president for Ace Parking, Inc., the garage operator. At least 350 spots were still open late Friday afternoon, he said.

“We expected more,” he said.

Doughty, the La Mesa resident, said she took the trolley downtown from home and then rode one of the free shuttle buses circulating around downtown to the center. “The trolley was filled, and the shuttle was jammed, so there is a lot of local interest,” she said.

Aisles between the roughly 1,200 booths set up in the main exhibit hall were crowded but not suffocatingly dense.

Crowds wandered among exhibits displaying everything from sailboats to garbage trucks, classic cars to “sediment chemistry.”

“It’s wonderful,” said Lora Hindman of La Mesa. “What amazes me is how quiet everything is inside--there must be a lot of insulation. I think there will be a lot of local support for it.”