Boston Convention and Exhibition Center

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Boston Convention and Exhibition Center at night.

The Boston Convention and Exhibition Center (BCEC) is the largest exhibition center in the Northeast United States, with some 1,700,000 square feet (15.8 hectare) of contiguous exhibition space. It is located near the South Boston waterfront, Boston's World Trade Center, and across the harbor from Logan International Airport. The main exhibition floor comprises three bays which can be isolated for separate shows or linked into one large space.

The center is about one block south of the World Trade Center station on the MBTA Silver Line, with direct connections to South Station and Logan airport.

[edit] History

The 2006 LinuxWorld trade show filled about 2/3 of the north bay at BCEC.

For short time the owner of the National Football League's New England Patriots, Robert Kraft also tried unsuccessfully to turn the same parcel of land that the convention center is on into a new home stadium for the football team that would have been closer to Boston, but he was unable to get the surrounding neighborhoods to agree with the deal because of concerns about traffic.

The push for a new convention center in Boston came in the late 1990's when the semiannual Apple Macintosh MacWorld trade show, that had been held in Boston each summer, moved to the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City, in part, it was thought, because no single Boston venue could contain the entire show (though Apple denied this was the reason). The center has been controversial because it is located in the South Boston Seaport which is some distance from the main concentration of hotels in Boston. However several new hotels have been planned or built near the convention center. The convention center opened in June 2004. That summer MacWorld returned to Boston as the BCEC's first trade show, but the show's reduced size, due in part to lack of participation by Apple, relegated its 2005 meeting (its last)^[1] to the smaller Hynes Convention Center in Boston's Back Bay.

With the opening of a new Westin headquarters hotel, the BCEC has staged comeback. In 2007, the convention center saw over 1.6 million attendees booking over 1 million hotel roomnights. This equates to an economic impact of over 890 million dollars according to the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority's 2007 Annual Report. ^[2]

The New England Auto Show, long a staple for the Bayside Expo Center moved to the new BCEC and has signed on through 2009. This show is expected to bring in 90,000 attendees to the convention center. Also in 2007, the BCEC was honored with the 2007 Convention Center of the Year at the Event Solutions Spotlight Awards. Other big shows in 2007 were AIIM/On Demand, the Yankee Dental Congress, and eBay! Live. The BCEC's recent success has spurred further talks about expansion. ^[3]

Concerns that the BCEC will destroy the market for the Hynes Convention Center has so far proved unfounded as the smaller Hynes has seen a nearly 10% growth in bookings last year compared to 2006.