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Rather than being an Avenue of the Arts, the concrete blight that is North Broad resembles the Boulevard of Parking. Buildings came down at regular intervals with little to replace them.
Dining? Hah! Shopping? Absurd. Green space? Please. Your car, however, has myriad choices. The neighborhood might as well be renamed Parkway Corp.
Businesses bet, and lost, on the hope that It would come. It would be a larger, all-purpose Pennsylvania Convention Center to suit all tourism needs, making the city competitive with Boston and Washington. "It's too small!" the Daily News headline roared before the center's 1993 opening.
"Fifteen years to build a convention center is not out of the norm," says Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corp.'s Meryl Levitz.
Yet the finished version of this convention center is taking so much longer. The expansion is scheduled to open March 2011, a quarter-century after the convention center was hatched in earnest.
The Eiffel Tower? Two years. Sistine Chapel? Eight to build, four to paint. Boston has the Big Dig; we have the Big Stall - infected with the politics, patronage, herculean egos and internecine warfare that is Philadelphia's core business.
In June, the region's convention, tourism and marketing groups proposed raising the hotel tax by 1.5 percentage points to 15.5 percent, a higher rate than all but three other cities', for a "hospitality promotion tax."
Locally, the measure is wildly popular, possibly because the people paying for it aren't here.
"We're going to tax our customers to give others money to help our business into the future," says Bill Fitzgerald of the Greater Philadelphia Hotel Association. "We want to play with the big boys."
Meanwhile, the two Philadelphia casinos that are supposed to help fund the expansion are not built, held up by politics, infighting, and perhaps the most dreaded words in construction delays: the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. All that's missing is the discovery of an endangered mollusk and the Environmental Protection Agency's involvement, which might happen any day.
"You're getting to the point where the cost will outweigh the benefit," Rendell told The Inquirer's Marcia Gelbart. "You're not there yet, but we're getting to the point."
Which may be why, after I began asking about delays, cost overruns, funding issues, the governor's sentiments, and future benefits of the expansion, I was greeted yesterday morning by not one, not two, but seven charming tourism, marketing and convention officials representing four different entities, a full charm affront offering a giddy, Panglossian view of our region's tourism future.
"Instead of being a manufacturing base," said the Convention Center's chief executive, Ahmeenah Young, "we've turned this into a tourism base." To hear these officials tell it, everything that happened in the city - the Kimmel Center, the new Please Touch Museum - was meant to court visitors, not residents.
The tax is needed to promote Philadelphia's changing, expanding identity. "We need to tell new stories to people," Levitz said. "Novelty is really high on their radar."
The questions remain: Who will subsidize such novelty, and where will the costs end? Best not to worry, as all's for the best in this best of all possible convention centers.
at 215-854-2586 or kheller@phillynews.com. Read her blog at http://go.philly.com/populist.
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