Booming progress at the Convention Center

As construction zones go, this one is especially hard to miss: a terrain stretching from 13th Street to Broad, Arch Street to Race, inhabited by cranes, mini-lifts and scissorjacks.

Loud too: a cacophony of mechanical beasts - jackhammers, saws, generator engines - sounding notes of structural progress.

"It's good for the economy. I love it," said Andrew Yeager, 53, of Bensalem, a journeyman with Ironworkers Local 401, perched six stories above the street welding steel frames - grinding and smoothing them out - for the glass that will wrap around the soon-to-be-expanded Pennsylvania Convention Center.

These days, an army of 450 workers fan out over the eight acres that will become the $786 million expansion of the center, geared to catapult Philadelphia into the major leagues of convention cities.

The project is 76 percent complete now. The structural skeleton is done, and work on remaining exterior skin and interior finishes has shifted into overdrive.

Thursday, drywall was going up in the new meeting rooms; an escalator (one of five pairs) was installed, and concrete slabs were placed in the small exhibit room to help stage the masonry project out on Broad Street.

On the fifth level, near the 55,400-square-foot Terrace Ballroom, mason tender Brendan Bard was mixing cement and stacking blocks, "to keep the flow going" for his fellow bricklayers.

"All the necessities . . . so they don't have to stop," said Bard, 36, of Aldan, Delaware County. "We have to get this done and knock it out."

For Sarah Gittens, 29, a field inspector in charge of quality control for Kia Inc., it's been "an overwhelming experience" walking the site for the last eight months.

"It's big. It's huge," said Gittens, whose company is a small, woman-owned construction management firm - 29 percent of contracts were awarded to women and minorities. "And everything is going up amazingly fast."

Huge is the point: The bigger facility will allow the city to host two events, like a major trade show and a large convention, at the same time - something the Convention Center has been unable to do because space was scarce.

Fast is the point, too: More than $2 billion in convention business has already been booked for 2011 and beyond, according to the Philadelphia Convention and Visitors Bureau, which is in charge of selling the new space.

Among the new bookings is LIGHTFAIR International, billed as the world's largest architectural and commercial lighting trade show - a major coup.

Wednesday, the show announced it was moving its May 2011 gathering from New York City to Philadelphia because of all that new space. The five-day show is expected to use 12,875 total hotel rooms and add $23 million to the city's economy.

When it makes its expected debut in early March, the enlarged Convention Center will be the 14th largest in the United States, bigger than even New York's.

It will house what is being billed as the largest ballroom on the East Coast, plus 260,000 square feet of new exhibition space, and an additional 63,000 square feet of meeting space to accommodate 6,000 people.

"It's a really large footprint and will put the existing Convention Center in a much more competitive position," Joseph Resta, project executive for the Pennsylvania Convention Center Authority who is overseeing the expansion, said during a site tour Thursday. "It puts us in a situation to have new product right when the convention market starts to recover."

The estimated economic impact seems as big as the expansion itself: 280,000 additional hotel-room nights, or $140 million per year; an additional 18,700 jobs, primarily in hospitality, worth $1 billion.

The western facade of the existing center, demolished in summer 2008, has since been rebuilt to provide a seamless connection between the old and the new.

As of last month, Resta said, more than $510.3 million in contracts had been awarded on the project, and 915,111 hours of work performed. By the time it's completed, the expansion will have created 1,800 construction and construction-related jobs.

On any given night in Center City, about 40 percent of the 10,900 hotel rooms there are filled by conventions and other groups.

"The expansion, along with a robust leisure market, will continue to increase both domestic and international visitors and bring much-needed revenue to the entire Philadelphia region," said Ed Grose, executive director of the Greater Philadelphia Hotel Association.

The expanded Convention Center could bring an additional 2,000 to 2,500 hotel rooms to Center City, create 1,750 new hotel jobs, and generate more than $50 million in tax revenue in the first year alone, Grose said.

When all the work is finished, visitors will be greeted by a new Convention Center District, too, including retail, cultural attractions, an improved streetscape, and lighting. That is currently in the planning stages, said Ahmeenah Young, president and CEO of the Convention Center Authority.

She envisions the district as a gateway to the city's museum area.

"We have to give our visitors a memorable pedestrian experience," Young said. "I certainly believe this is the biggest thing to happen to the city and the state since we opened the existing building in 1993."

Big was the point, after all.