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Driving upto the new Charlotte Convention Center you can see that it's big. It covers almost
an entire city block
This 850,000-square-foot building, which sprawls over 11 acres on an uptown block bounded by College, 2nd, Brevard and Stonewall streets is the city's biggest public project ever at more than $141 million.
Civic leaders are counting on the center to attract larger and more frequent conventions and shows to the city. It dwarfs the 82,000 square feet of exhibit space in the old center and elevates Charlotte to the nation's top 20 in total exhibit space.
Let's begin our tour outside the main public entrance on College Street across from the 1st Street intersection. The center has 900 doors throughout, and the staff wants to make sure this is the one visitors use. Otherwise, they could spend a couple of days trying to get into an event.
On this corner, the entrance is most likely to catch the pedestrian traffic walking south from The Square, where the uptown hotels are concentrated.
But once you push open the glass doors, you're in the College Street Concourse - a reception area with dimensions so colossal you can't help but feel like a tiny little ant in a kid's see-through ant farm.
The concourse, which parallels 2nd Street, is 240 feet long and four stories high with one set of escalators leading up to the ballroom and meeting rooms and another set leading down to the exhibit floor.
This concourse connects with the Grand Hall, which has a 36-foot-wide circular skylight, or oculus, on top, and the 2nd Street Concourse.
You need walking shoes if you're traveling from one end to the other.
On the north wall of the concourse are columns and glass windows towering five stories high. On the south is a balcony that lets people using the upper level meeting rooms, lounge and cafe to glimpse the activity at ground level.
Architects used glass extensively in the design - 268,000 square feet
overall - to prevent visitors from feeling trapped inside a
concrete-and-steel box.
`The Grand Hall will be the focal point.. The two concourses converge under a yet-to-be installed prism-like sculpture that will hang from the oculus. Concourse arches will glow red and purple at night from lights around the ceiling.
Paintings by six N.C. artists illustrating their interpretations of the Charlotte region will hang along a wall in the 2nd Street Concourse.
The center's natural light and openness add to its attraction, but they weren't included just to make it look pretty.
Visitors should be able to walk out of meeting rooms and immediately get their bearings from the view of the skyline and the light angle.
Look up, and you can see the NationsBank Corporate Center and several other skyscrapers through the windows.
But to ensure that no one does get lost, a concierge - just like the ones
you see in the finer hotels - will be stationed at a desk inside the College
Street entrance doors.
The College Street Concourse will be used mainly for registration but will have modern chrome-and-leather furniture for guests, as well as floor space for services such as car rental, airline tickets, photocopy machines, fax machines and automatic tellers.
The concourse includes lockers where visitors can store luggage and personal items, VIP suites and show offices overlooking the exhibit halls.
Also on ground level is a box office with one outside and two inside windows selling tickets to shows and special entertainment in Charlotte.
Now let's go up the escalators.
The first thing you see is some interesting basic blue carpet with red-yellow-purple geometric designs and a 35,000-square-foot ballroom with purple walls and light wood paneling. With a seating capacity of 2,500 people, it's three times the size of the city's largest ballroom currently in use, located at Omni Charlotte.
The lighting fixtures are recessed in a white, flat ceiling with long geometric beams that run the length of the room. That gives the interior a more cozy feeling than the traditional ballroom with chandeliers. And with the glow from the soft lights, it feels more like a modern office building conference room than a ballroom.
Also on this level are 21 meeting rooms with walls that can be moved to divide the space into as many as 37 rooms with theater-style setting for 50 to 2,000 people.
Conventioneers can spill out of the meeting rooms into large corridors that connect with the a 75-seat lounge and 375-seat cafe, which will be open to the general public as well as people attending events there.
And through a central taping system, the convention center can record meetings in any room and offer copies to participants.
Restrooms on this level and the exhibit floor down below have moveable walls between the men's and women's facilities so the number of stalls can be adjusted to the sex ratio of the people attending a particular event.
This is a neat feature, too: Service corridors - no fancy carpeting here - extend, out of sight, along the outer walls of the meeting room/ballroom level so servers can deliver meals and roll food carts from the main kitchen without having to weave through jammed corridors.
The kitchen can serve up to 6,500 people at one time.
Stairs on this level lead up to the center's administrative offices in the glass rotunda facing the College/Stonewall streets corner. Office doors are glass also, allowing natural light to flow, in and the walls are painted peach.
In all, about 75 people, including administrative, food service and maintenance staffers, will work in the new building, says Steve Camp, managing director of the Auditorium-Coliseum-Convention Center Authority.
We're still standing in the administrative offices, so let's head back down the steps, down the meeting level escalator to the ground floor and down one more level to the exhibit floor.
Wow! This is 280,000 square feet - almost 6.5 acres - of wide open space, enough to accommodate 5-1/2 football fields. I've seen farmers raise a family on fewer acres.
The convention staff wanted enough exhibit square footage to accommodate on one level everything from heavy textile machinery to 50-foot yachts, and in this facility they got it.
In fact, the center's first public event - the Mid-Atlantic Boat Show - will fill the exhibit floor with some of the biggest boats ever seen indoors - a 70-foot Summerset houseboat, a 50-foot Sea Ray Sundancer, a 39-foot Hatteras recreational boat.
And don't forget the 100-plus bass boats and 4,000-gallon aquarium stocked with largemouth bass.
At the end of our tour is the place where show participants will roll all those boats onto the showroom floor - a 22-bay loading dock that's connected underneath the street to the College Street side of the facility so traffic isn't blocked during unloading.
Outside the new center also has a 19,600-square-foot garden on College Street and a 17,800-square-foot ballroom terrace off 2nd Street. Both can be used for receptions, parties and public events.
Our next stop will be at the Government Center where our government is conducted.
Related Sites
The above tour information was adapted from an article written by Doug Smith and appeared in the Charlotte Observer Sunday, December 18, 1994. You can visit the Charlotte Observer and their new online service, Charlotte.Com, at the link below.
Directions
New Charlotte Convention Center
501 South College Street
Charlotte, NC 28202
Phone 800-432-7488 FAX 704-339-6111
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