Business View Magazine - October 2016 143
face-to-face activities. “So, our Mayor, William Donald
Schaefer, and [Maryland] Governor, Marvin Mandel,
were very forward thinking and said, ‘Let’s look at the
opportunity of building a convention center,’” Daidakis
reports. “And that’s what they did. They showed that
bringing in out-of-towners would grow the economy in
the city and state.”
As a result, the original Baltimore Convention Center
building was financed with a combination of state
bonds and city funds. It had 115,000 square feet
of exhibit space and 40,000 square feet of meeting
rooms. “In those days, that was a medium-size facil-
ity and we could handle 85 percent of the events that
needed space of that type,” Daidakis says. “Then we
started to see that we were not able to grow the busi-
ness, because we had reached capacity. A study was
done, and it showed that we could support tripling the
size of the Convention Center.”
The reason for that study’s optimistic conclusion was
because by the time the Convention Center opened,
Baltimore was already going through a period of in-
tense redevelopment. The city’s waterfront and his-
toric seaport, known as the Inner Harbor, was trans-
forming itself with the addition of parks, plazas, office
AT A GLANCE
WHO:
The Baltimore Convention Center
WHAT:
A premier location for conventions and
tradeshows in the Mid-Atlantic region
WHERE:
Baltimore, Maryland
WEBSITE
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