Center Attraction : Tourism: Expanded Downtown convention facility opens with an amusement park trade show. At ribbon-cutting, mayor talks about job creation.

Packed with carousels, bumper cars, video games and cotton candy machines, the newly expanded Los Angeles Convention Center blasted off for business Wednesday with a gaudy trade show that symbolized the economic importance of tourism.

“What better industry to be your first tenant than the amusement industry, because we promote fun,” said Roy Gillian, president of the International Assn. of Amusement Parks and Attractions.

And fun on a very big scale it is. Displays range from a $1.8-million virtual reality center that simulates undersea adventures to a plastic spider ring that wholesales for less than a penny. In all, 818 manufacturers, jugglers, fire-eaters and caterers will be hawking their amusement-oriented products and services. The show is not open to the public, but about 18,000 conventioneers are expected by the time the gathering ends Saturday.

“It’s the one time of the year when you make face-to-face contact with this many people,” said Phyllis Seidel, vice president of a New Mexico firm that sells Skee-Ball games updated with electronic technology. “It’s also when you meet and greet old friends. So it’s as much social as it is business.”

As for the new convention center, Seidel was in sync with many other first-time visitors Wednesday when she pronounced it “a beautiful facility, no question about it.”

For Los Angeles officials, the center is something more. To them, the opening show is the first payoff on a $500-million gamble to revive the convention, hotel and tourism business in Downtown Los Angeles. The four-year project more than doubled the center’s size, making it able to accommodate the amusement convention and other large shows that had stayed away from Los Angeles because of inadequate facilities.

At an early morning opening ceremony, Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan emphasized the potential employment that is possible from having the largest convention center on the West Coast: “Los Angeles can earn its way into a higher share of this important market and this means jobs,” he told a crowd of about 400 who gathered outside one of the center’s two new glass-tower lobbies.

To help with a symbolic ribbon pulling, Riordan called former Mayor Tom Bradley up to the stage from the audience, in an acknowledgment that Bradley’s Administration planned the center and arranged its financing through bonds that are to be paid off in hotel occupancy taxes. Nine members of the City Council also took part in the ceremony, as did members of four trade unions that represent center workers.

Three thousand blue, green and white balloons were sent flying into the bright, sunny sky. The balloon colors matched the shades of the center’s metal and glass facades that stretch along Figueroa Street, from 11th Street to Venice Boulevard. As designed by Gruen Associates of Los Angeles and Pei Cobb Freed & Partners of New York, the new and old wings are connected by a two-story concourse of meeting rooms that spans Pico Boulevard. The center, with 805,000 square feet of meeting and exhibit space, has jumped from 27th largest in the nation to eighth.

Publicly unspoken at the ceremony were fears in the convention industry that the Los Angeles center--and its bond payments--will be hurt by the lack of an adjacent hotel and by a sense that the immediate neighborhood needs improvements. But in an interview, George D. Kirkland, president of the Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau, expressed confidence that the center will reach its capacity of about 40 large conventions a year by 1998.

“We have 20 booked for the next 12 months,” Kirkland said. “That’s low if you are looking at capacity, but it’s a big improvement over the three we had last year when we were still losing business to Anaheim, San Francisco and even Las Vegas.”

If Los Angeles’ image, as well as the center’s size, hurt convention business in the past, some participants at the amusement show said they are no more nervous about crime, earthquakes and brush fires than they are about troubles in other big cities.

“We have no negative reaction to Los Angeles,” said Walter Bolliger, who is president of a Swiss company that creates roller coaster rides that spin passengers upside-down. “Every country has its problems. In Europe, we have the war in Yugoslavia.”

But William Stevens, a games manufacturer from Britain, admitted to being “a little edgy” when he got lost Tuesday night and drove along Skid Row as homeless men were lighting fires in metal drums. Still, in the warm sunshine Wednesday next to a 125-foot-high Ferris wheel on the center’s grounds, he acknowledged that “most people are happy to be in Los Angeles.”