![]() It suggests replacing the 337-room Sheraton with a 500-room hotel that would be the second one connected to the convention center. ![]() The oldest portion of the convention center, the East Building, opened in 1979 the center expanded into its West Building between Sharp and Howard streets in 1997. The report calls for expanding convention center square footage from 1.2 million to 1.7 million, including an increase in exhibit space from 300,000 square feet to at least 400,000 square feet. The Maryland Stadium Authority commissioned the $460,000 study in May 2017, and tapped a team that included Ayers Saint Gross, a Baltimore design firm LMN Architects of Seattle Clark Construction of Bethesda Populous, a Kansas City firm that designed Oriole Park at Camden Yards and Perkins Eastman, a New York-based design firm. The report released Friday was aimed at exploring the feasibility and the logistics of reviving such an idea. But that initiative stalled after Hackerman died in 2014. The idea of a renovated convention center combined with an arena and hotel originated in 2011, when construction magnate Willard Hackerman floated a $900 million proposal and offered his investment. Pugh spokesman Greg Tucker called talk of replacing the arena “another discussion at some point.” “Baltimore needs to stay competitive and investing in these anchor facilities will undoubtedly prove an investment in our future.” “I’m committed to ensuring that these important city venues are fully able to accommodate the increased demand for high quality sporting, leisure and business experiences,” she said. Pugh said in a statement that investment in the convention center - and another aged city property, Pimlico Race Course - are “top priorities.” The next step in the process will explore costs of the options under consideration. The analysis doesn’t estimate price tags for the various options, but says a new arena would require significant private investment. The most complicated plan architects and designers analyzed would include a 500-room hotel and an arena with seating for as many as 17,500 people.Īll scenarios that were studied call for demolition of the convention center’s aged East Building, bounded by Pratt, Sharp and Charles streets, and also suggests the convention center would need to take over the footprint of the Sheraton Inner Harbor Hotel at Conway and Charles streets to make room for adequate convention exhibition space. The study lays out a range of proposals, even the most conservative of which would take at least four years to complete and add hundreds of thousands of square feet of exhibition and meeting space. “It is simply not feasible to include that much programming in that small footprint,” said Bill Cole, executive director of the Baltimore Development Corp.īut the stadium authority is advancing a proposal to build a second convention center hotel, in part because even without an arena in the design, convention center expansion would likely require taking over the footprint of the nearby Sheraton Inner Harbor hotel at Conway and South Charles streets.Īl Hutchinson, CEO of Visit Baltimore, said that proposal could spur growth in the city’s convention business, which has lost some major meetings because groups have outgrown the existing convention center space and downtown hotels. Such a project - squeezing new convention space, an arena and a new 500-room hotel along West Pratt, South Charles and Conway streets downtown - was expected to take as long as six years to design and build, according to a report the stadium authority also released Friday. Baltimore Sun eNewspaper Home Page Close MenuĬity and state economic development leaders have concluded that a plan to build a replacement for Royal Farms Arena on the site of the Baltimore Convention Center is too ambitious and complicated to be realistic.Ī group of officials evaluating options for convention center expansion decided that including an arena in the project is “not recommended” because of “significant operational and construction related challenges,” Michael Frenz, the Maryland Stadium Authority’s executive director, told Mayor Catherine Pugh in a letter Friday.
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