Businesses Tally Up Super Bowl Bonanza : Commerce: The score so far--big restaurant and hotel profits, an anticipated infusion of tax revenues, and Rose Bowl improvements.

The last whooping Dallas Cowboys fans and lamenting Buffalo Bills backers have nearly disappeared, and city workers are still hauling away an estimated 50 tons of trash left from Super Bowl XXVII, but the results were well worth it, city officials say.

Among other things, there were some big profits for hotel and restaurant owners, a much needed infusion of tax revenues for the city, and some permanent improvements to the Rose Bowl stadium.

But most important of all, city officials say, is a stronger, worldwide image of the city--already famous for its annual Tournament of Roses Parade and Rose Bowl college football game--as a great place to visit.

When it played host to four previous Super Bowls, Pasadena was largely excluded from moneymaking events associated with the big game. But this year, much of the pre-Super Bowl build-up focused on the city.

Between the National Football League championship game and events such as the NFL Experience--a makeshift theme park set up in Brookside Park--as many as 250,000 people, mostly from out of town, poured through the Arroyo Seco between Thursday and Sunday, city officials said. About 150,000 showed up for weekend festivities in Old Pasadena.

Regional officials estimate that the Super Bowl brought a one-time infusion of $150 million into the Los Angeles-area economy, a fat chunk of which presumably went to Pasadena.

“The people who came here were the big spenders,” City Manager Philip Hawkey said.

With the 1994 World Cup finals in soccer scheduled for the Rose Bowl and the prospect of another Super Bowl as early as 1997, there should be more of the same soon, euphoric area business people say.

Some merchants in the Old Pasadena area--the setting for last weekend’s Supersports and Musicfest--were happily toting up the profits this week. After area streets were closed to vehicular traffic on Saturday, customers began flooding the streets and sidewalks--and the restaurants and bars.

At the Parkway Grill, reservations were made weeks before the game.

“We started getting people calling from Texas and New York,” manager Daniel Schott said. “We were basically booked solid for the two nights of the weekend.”

It was a happy crowd, Schott added. “Some folks were standing up, toasting their teams,” he said. “Then (former Chicago Bears coach) Mike Ditka came in and it got real lively.”

“We were doing record-breaking business,” said Caroline Walker, a bartender at Barney’s on Colorado Boulevard. “They were four deep at the bar. Of our 12 beers on tap, we ran out of seven.”

It was the same down the street at C. T.’s Sports Bar.

“We went through a lot of beer, a lot of high-dollar whiskey, like Chivas Regal,” said manager Dan Lucas. “We were basically full from about noon Thursday to Sunday night.

“About midnight, we finally closed the doors and refused to let any more in.”

The bounty spread well beyond Old Pasadena, sweeping into establishments like Crown City Brewery, a restaurant which had its best week ever last week, and the Green Street Restaurant, where there were waits of 45 minutes to an hour last weekend.

The Green Street Restaurant had the distinction of serving more than 300 diners during the game, even though there wasn’t a single television in the place.

As an event, this year’s Super Bowl seemed to levitate past pure athletics into the realm of popular culture, suggested City Councilman William E. Thomson Jr.

“There were remarkable contrasts between this year and 1987 (the last time the Super Bowl was held in the Rose Bowl),” Thomson said. “Thousands of people actually travel to the site . . . just to experience the events leading up to the game, with never a hope of getting a ticket to the game.”

Some of the big spenders stayed overnight in the city. The premiere hotels, and even some of the smaller ones, were booked solid.

“We were sold out virtually the whole week,” David Walters, general manager of the 350-room Doubletree Hotel, said Monday. “We’re still sold out today. A lot of our people are out on the golf courses.”

In addition to room rentals, the three-year-old Doubletree did a brisk party business in its 15,000 square feet of banquet facilities.

“The economic impact and volume have been astounding,” Walters said. “It’s the best we’ve ever done.”

It was much the same at the rebuilt Ritz-Carlton Huntington Hotel, where U. S. senators, sports celebrities and the cast of the new NBC series “Homicide” attended Sunday’s bash thrown by NBC Sports.

“It was the culmination of the Ritz-Carlton’s re-entry into the social scene of Southern California,” said Scott Long, a spokesman for the hotel.

But nobody has firm numbers yet on what the event has meant for Pasadena fiscally.

The city is slated to get $1 million as its share of the sale of 2,500 game tickets, part of the National Football League’s payoff to the consortium of cities and teams that negotiated to bring the game here.

“As of Friday afternoon, there were no tickets left,” Deputy City Manager Edmund Sotelo said.

The Rose Bowl has new lights, new electrical and telephone hook-ups in the parking area, the foundations for an electronic scoreboard and a $100,000 donation to a special city charity fund--all courtesy of the NFL.

The city’s share of sales tax and transient occupancy tax revenues do not generally reach city coffers until four to six months after they are paid, finance officials say. Those revenues should give the city a shot in the arm sometime next summer.

Because city hotels are generally about 70% full under ordinary circumstances, however, the increase in room tax revenues will be relatively modest, one finance official said. Besides, hotel profits were largely concentrated in the city’s opulent west side.

“This was a kind of corporate crowd,” Hawkey said. “The business went to the Doubletree, the Hilton and the Ritz, but not so much to the Saga Motor Hotel on East Colorado Boulevard.”

Not so, said Cil Carlson, assistant manager at the Saga.

“We were booked up for three days,” she said Wednesday. “Most of them were Buffalo fans. A few of them are still here, would you believe it?”

On an ordinary weekend the hotel is 50% occupied, she said.

There was some grumbling about the failure of the NFL to give a major share of the jobs and contracts to Pasadena minority group members. City Councilman Isaac Richard said he had received complaints from black vendors who were prevented from selling merchandise in the stadium area.

Hawkey said there was a concerted effort by the NFL to use local workers and businesses, such as caterers and tree pruners, but data on who was actually employed is not yet available.

The big payoff should take place in marketing, merchants and city officials say. The city’s pride and stature after a successful national event like the Super Bowl are invaluable in terms of selling the city, Hawkey said.

Business people and city officials are waiting anxiously to see if there will be long-term residual effects.

“That’s what we’re keeping our fingers crossed about,” said Jack Smith, president of the Old Pasadena Business Assn. “Old Pasadena is the spot to be in, in Southern California. It depends on how long we can ride the wave.

“The amount of international press we got--you couldn’t buy that for $100,000,” said Smith, whose business association members appeared to have profited most from the Super Bowl.

“It’s a perception that corporate officials have when making decisions about where to locate regional offices or headquarters,” Hawkey said.

“It adds to our ability to attract students and professors to Caltech, or engineers to Parsons (the Pasadena engineering firm Ralph M. Parsons Co.). It all helps with the presentation that Pasadena is a good place to live and do business.”