L.A. May Be Just the Place to Host Convention in ’96

Walking through the new Los Angeles Convention Center, it’s easy to imagine one of the political parties meeting here in 1996 to nominate its presidential candidate.

Network sky boxes would hang from the ceiling in back of the exhibit hall. A large indented space in front of the hall is just right for the rostrum. There’s plenty of room for delegates and spectators on a 680,000-square-foot floor. That is as much space as occupied by seven football fields.

I was given this last fact by Gary Sherwin, director of media relations for the Los Angeles Convention & Visitors Bureau as he showed me around the place last Friday. I looked skeptical. “Not side by side,” he said. You’d have to fit them together, like a jigsaw puzzle.

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The exhibit hall is named after former Mayor Tom Bradley, as are so many things in town. In fact, I’d boarded the subway at the Tom Bradley station to meet Sherwin earlier for lunch at the First Interstate Tower, just across the street from the refurbished Central Library, which has a new wing bearing the ex-mayor’s name.

We looked at Gilbert Linsday Plaza in front of the center, a tribute to the late councilman, who represented the area. “Largest landscaped plaza in Los Angeles,” Sherwin said. Lindsay, a small man with grandiose ideas, would have liked that.

And we paused at my favorite place, Yorty Hall, the exhibition space in the original convention center, now the north wing of the new facility. I was there when it opened in 1971 with a Hawaiian celebration that perfectly reflected the tastes of Mayor Sam Yorty.

For that event, which looked like it had been choreographed by someone from Las Vegas, semi-clad dancing girls filled the stage, along with a volcano that actually belched smoke.

Mayor Sam, Councilman Gil and Mayor Tom were all part of an era we’ve just passed, a time when L.A. was relentlessly on the move, when growth looked as though it would never stop.

Faced with other cities building larger, more lavish facilities, civic boosters pressed for a bigger convention center. It was approved by the City Council in 1986.

A huge piece of Pico-Union, a poor neighborhood, was bulldozed. As far as displacement of the poor, there had been nothing like it since the bulldozing of Chavez Ravine’s modest homes to make room for Dodger Stadium. This was old-fashioned boom town L.A., plunging ahead regardless of who got hurt.

Signs of trouble appeared as work began on the $500-million project. Plans for a big hotel adjacent to the convention center collapsed along with the ‘80s financial boom. The riot made things worse. To skeptics, it looked as though the convention center would turn out to be a white elephant.

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Not a chance, said Sherwin. We were approaching the center, located on a 63-acre site bounded by Figueroa Street, 11th Street, Venice Boulevard and the Harbor Freeway. Next year, he said, 19 conventions, with 250,000 delegates, have been signed up.

“That’s probably less than half of what we want to have on an annual basis,” he said. The center’s goal is 45 conventions a year. The center has to hit the goal. It was financed by bonds to be repaid from revenues from the hotel room tax. Unless the vacancy rate improves, the city will have to dip into its treasury to pay interest on the bonds.

The 1996 national political conventions would be the biggest prizes. Mayor Richard Riordan, a Republican, is working hard to get both the GOP and the Democratic meetings.

But both efforts face obstacles.

If Republican Gov. Pete Wilson is reelected next year, he’ll be a presidential contender and his foes would fight against giving him a home field advantage. On the Democratic side, L.A. faces stiff competition from Chicago. But California, with its 54 electoral votes, will be important for President Clinton, and a convention here might give him a boost in this difficult state.

“A Democratic convention has never gone to a city where there is not a Democratic mayor,” said Democratic state chairman Bill Press, who is involved in the campaign to bring the meeting here. “But the mayor really wants it to happen. He is really on board.”

A successful convention on worldwide television could send a message that L.A. is back. That was the message that went out from Manhattan when New York City, emerging from bankruptcy, hosted the Democratic National Convention in 1976.

I hope it happens. And if it does, I hope the convention bosses find room for a touch of showmanship as gaudy as Mayor Sam’s smoke-belching volcano.