Five Drastic Steps To Revive Downtown Jacksonville

[ChriswUfGator]

Let me ask you this; How many visitors do you think these shows attract?

Good question.  Does anyone have real verifiable numbers?  The three I listed seem very well attended.  Boat shows are so popular we get two downtown every year.

Well I can tell you that the Prime Osborn has 78,500 square feet of convention space and the Hyatt has 110,000 square feet of convention space. The Hyatt could easily host everything the Prime Osborn hosts now, not counting the spillover space available at the Landing that they could coordinate with Sleiman on if they needed it. That would be a direct stimulus to private business downtown, unlike the current center which directly competes with it.

I also have been to the boat shows and the home and patio show, and while they are well-attended, those events would fit in the Hyatt's 110,000 square feet as well as they fit in the Prime-Osborn's 78,500. Our convention center really isn't that large, the Hyatt has as much space and we don't have to subsidize it as taxpayers.

http://www.hyattregencyjacksonville.com/venues-meetings

Kind of blows your argument up, doesn't it?

[BridgeTroll]

The 110,000 is combined space... not one large exhibit hall.

Overview
Stage your important events in our expansive Jacksonville meeting facility; at 110,000 square feet it’s the largest in Northeast Florida. Whether you're planning a simple one-day meeting or an elaborate weeklong conference, you will find that our spacious downtown Jacksonville convention center hotel offers everything to meet your needs, including:

Creative catering, including Personal Preference Dining®, for small groups or large parties
110,000 square feet of flexible function space including a 27,984 square foot Grand Ballroom, 20,876 square feet of pre-function space and 21,120 square feet of unique outdoor terrace space overlooking the beautiful St. Johns River.
Meeting space designed for small meetings, several meeting rooms feature windows overlooking the St. Johns River.
Spacious hospitality suites with outdoor terraces
Experienced meeting and event planners, ready to help take care of the details from the initial planning phases to the day of the event.
A Meeting Concierge at your side from start to finish during your meeting.
Innovative event technology and meeting services, with our on-site experts Audio Visual to ensure flawless execution and high impact event.
Business Center with computer terminals, fax machines and printers.
966 newly renovated, luxuriously appointed guestrooms
Minutes from the Prime Osborn III Convention Center with over 265,000 square feet of meeting and exhibit space.

Never tried to get a boat or car up an elevator or escalator but I would love to get it on video,...

[BridgeTroll]

Largest rooms

P.O.... 78,500 sf
Hyatt... 28,000 sf

[ChriswUfGator]

The 110,000 is combined space... not one large exhibit hall.

Overview
Stage your important events in our expansive Jacksonville meeting facility; at 110,000 square feet it’s the largest in Northeast Florida. Whether you're planning a simple one-day meeting or an elaborate weeklong conference, you will find that our spacious downtown Jacksonville convention center hotel offers everything to meet your needs, including:

Creative catering, including Personal Preference Dining®, for small groups or large parties
110,000 square feet of flexible function space including a 27,984 square foot Grand Ballroom, 20,876 square feet of pre-function space and 21,120 square feet of unique outdoor terrace space overlooking the beautiful St. Johns River.
Meeting space designed for small meetings, several meeting rooms feature windows overlooking the St. Johns River.
Spacious hospitality suites with outdoor terraces
Experienced meeting and event planners, ready to help take care of the details from the initial planning phases to the day of the event.
A Meeting Concierge at your side from start to finish during your meeting.
Innovative event technology and meeting services, with our on-site experts Audio Visual to ensure flawless execution and high impact event.
Business Center with computer terminals, fax machines and printers.
966 newly renovated, luxuriously appointed guestrooms
Minutes from the Prime Osborn III Convention Center with over 265,000 square feet of meeting and exhibit space.

Never tried to get a boat or car up an elevator or escalator but I would love to get it on video,...

So you have the event in two different rooms instead of one large one, I think people can figure out how to walk down a hallway, don't you? And the Hyatt has ground-level space, that whole ugly Ziggurat thing next to the building is meeting space. Never seen a car go up a level, really? Ever been in a parking garage?

The existing events don't fully utilize the Prime Osborn either...

[ChriswUfGator]

Largest rooms

P.O.... 78,500 sf
Hyatt... 28,000 sf

What does the largest room have to do with anything? You can't use two rooms? I didn't realize the boat show was somehow planning to put a 400' boat inside the building? Wow must be an amazing display!

[ChriswUfGator]

Oh, and one more thing, if BridgeTroll's silly argument reflected reality, then perhaps someone would care to explain why, back before we built any convention center at all and when the business was handled solely by the private hotels downtown, which model I'm suggesting we return to, we had 200k+ out of town convention visitors a year, and why after building several convention centers of increasingly greater size that number has somehow now dwindled to almost nothing? If space is really the issue here, why did this happen?

Anyone?

[BridgeTroll]

400' boat??  I realize that is smaller than you are used to but most of the boats at the shows are usually well south of 100'.  Car and boat shows do not want their exhibits in a parking garage as you are well aware...  

[ChriswUfGator]

400' boat??  I realize that is smaller than you are used to but most of the boats at the shows are usually well south of 100'.  Car and boat shows do not want their exhibits in a parking garage as you are well aware...  

Haha, I have never had a boat over 40' but I wish. I'm not suggesting that we actually hold the events in a parking garage, although now that you mention it, if we included parking garages, then downtown Jacksonville has more space than Orlando, Tampa, Las Vegas, San Diego, LA, Charlotte, and every other convention hall in the U.S. combined! Maybe we SHOULD start marketing our parking garages as convention space! (tongue in cheek)

But what I meant with the Hyatt is that the designers factor this kind of thing into the design, the building will have freight elevators or, more likely, ramps, that will allow for transporting large display items up and down levels in the convention space. I would almost guarantee there's a ramp and large entrance/exit doors, they all have that. The Hyatt could accomodate every event of the sizes presently held at the Prime-Osborn, they'd just need to put together 2 rooms to do it, or actually probably not since most of the events at the Prime Osborn still don't take up every square inch of space. I think most of us could stomach a 50 foot walk from one space to the next.

[fieldafm]

I give up out of sheer frustration now... my posts aren't showing up/getting deleted(?) for some reason.

Have at it...

[BridgeTroll]

I would almost guarantee there's a ramp and large entrance/exit doors, they all have that. The Hyatt could accomodate every event of the sizes presently held at the Prime-Osborn,

Again... I do not think this is the case.  There IS a freight elevator... but it will not handle a boat or a car... much less 50 or 60. 

http://www.jacksonville.hyatt.com/hyatt/images/hotels/jaxrj/floorplan.pdf

http://www.jacksonville.hyatt.com/hyatt/images/hotels/jaxrj/capacity.pdf

http://www.jacksonville.hyatt.com/hyatt/images/hotels/jaxrj/factsheet.pdf

[BridgeTroll]

I think there is a need for a convention center.  There are currently 21 events at a crappy facility located nowhere.  How many events would we have in a modern facility located...somewhere?

[Clem1029]

Chris...in reading your convention center posts over a few threads, can you clarify something in your position for me? Do you hold that Jacksonville doesn't need a convention center period, or that what we currently have is more than sufficient?

I think, at most, we need maybe a medium/small sized civic hall without all of the buerocracy and string-pulling that exists with a contract-managed convention center, where the service industry downtown doesn't benefit from it and the profits are made by out of town corporations. Let the private market host the events presently at the convention center, and have a civic auditorium for the public speeches and whatnot.

The Hyatt presently has facilities sufficient to host the events scheduled for the Prime Osborn, and is about bankrupt (like the other downtown hotels) because there isn't enough revenue. Closing the Prime Osborn would provide a revenue source to the Hyatt, which would provide convention services that we don't have to pay for as taxpayers, and then we get the added benefit of being able to reopen the train station.

It's a win on multiple levels, and won't require the taxpayers to continue funding a convention facility that is in direct competition with the private Hyatt facilities that we already also paid to build, with the result that both are failing at taxpayer expense.

OK, at the risk of putting words into your mouth (and please let me know if I'm missing something), your position combined with pieces of other downtown suggestions would look something like the following - kill off the transportation center boondoggle, convert PO back to the terminal, enhance transit, and let events at the PO just figure out how to utilize other space elsewhere downtown for their functions?

Just trying to wrap my head around how the pieces fit together.

[BridgeTroll]

Yes it is.  I imagine some of the events now held at the Prime could move to the Hyatt.  The 3 major ones certainly cannot despite Chris's assertions that boats and cars will go up the elevators.  Continuous space is most certainly another issue.  Hyatt simply does not have enough of that.

[ChriswUfGator]

I would almost guarantee there's a ramp and large entrance/exit doors, they all have that. The Hyatt could accomodate every event of the sizes presently held at the Prime-Osborn,

Again... I do not think this is the case.  There IS a freight elevator... but it will not handle a boat or a car... much less 50 or 60.  

http://www.jacksonville.hyatt.com/hyatt/images/hotels/jaxrj/floorplan.pdf

http://www.jacksonville.hyatt.com/hyatt/images/hotels/jaxrj/capacity.pdf

http://www.jacksonville.hyatt.com/hyatt/images/hotels/jaxrj/factsheet.pdf

Sure there is a ramp, it's the cement parking garage entrance ramp, you bring the car up the garage and through that ramp. The boat show would be largely outdoors anyway, you do that in the water, in the public area around the building, and at the Landing if needed, and the smaller boats (which is what the Prime Osborn has anyway) would fit inside. That's why they designed that ramp access into it, they all have something like this. Although it looks like they added some kind of offices in the middle of the ramp, so they might have screwed themselves on that one. Also, the 27k square foot ballroom drawings show collapsible walls between it and the 8 meeting rooms, and it's then surrounded by another 20k+ square feet of preconvention space. So added together this facility does look like it would have comparable single-room space to the Prime Osborn.

[ChriswUfGator]

Yes it is.  I imagine some of the events now held at the Prime could move to the Hyatt.  The 3 major ones certainly cannot despite Chris's assertions that boats and cars will go up the elevators.  Continuous space is most certainly another issue.  Hyatt simply does not have enough of that.

Who said cars don't go up freight elevators? Really? What about across ramps?