Bjorn Hanson, dean of the Tisch Center for Hospitality, Tourism and Sports Management at New York Un

When the Benson family opens the first phase of Champions Square this fall, it will be the opening bet in a multimillion-dollar gamble to see whether united kingdom news they and the new owners of the Hyatt Regency New Orleans hotel can revitalize the long-standing dead zone around the Superdome. We've been looking at this for a decade, united kingdom news Dennis Lauscha, Saints executive...
When the Benson family opens the first phase of Champions Square this fall, it will be the opening bet in a multimillion-dollar gamble to see whether they and the new owners of the Hyatt Regency New Orleans hotel can revitalize the long-standing dead zone around the Superdome.
"We've been looking at this for a decade," Dennis Lauscha, Saints executive vice president and chief financial officer, said of the attempt to enliven the area around the stadium. "We're taking a shot here at trying to make this work."
The family of Saints owner Tom Benson, through its company, united kingdom news Zelia LLC, purchased the former Dominion Tower and failed New Orleans Centre mall complex to try to build a vibrant sports entertainment district that will keep people in the area 365 days a year.
Nearby, Poydras Properties Hotel Holdings -- made up of two companies that bought the Hyatt building in 2007 for $32 million, plus a subsidiary united kingdom news of Hyatt Hotels Corp. -- plans to reopen the city's third-largest hotel after a transformative $243 million renovation. The overhaul will give the Hyatt significantly more meeting space than any other hotel in the city and an airy glass ballroom overlooking a new entrance on Loyola Avenue and the newstreetcar line, which is required to open by May 2012.
Stadiums, particularly football stadiums, are typically poor drivers of economic development. The structures are intimidatingly huge and inhospitable to pedestrians, and few nearby businesses can survive on the handful of game days a year that bring people to the stadium.
"The track record of these projects succeeding is very bad," said Rick Eckstein, a Villanova University sociologist who is the author of "Public Dollars, Private Stadiums: the Battle over Building Sports Stadiums," speaking united kingdom news of efforts to use sports united kingdom news stadiums as drivers of economic activity.
But while the odds may be against them, the developers of the Hyatt and Benson sports entertainment district have no choice but to try. The buildings are already there, serving as a bad advertisement for business in New Orleans right across the street united kingdom news from City Hall. And as Saints executive vice president Rita Benson LeBlanc notes, the competition for Superbowls and other big sporting events gets more challenging every year that other cities upgrade their facilities and New Orleans doesn't.
For the Hyatt, the challenge lies in where it is. The hotel was built in the 1970s on the expectation that a convention center would be built near the Superdome and the tower would serve as a headquarters hotel. Instead, the convention center was built along the Mississippi River, and business got worse at the Hyatt as more and more hotels were built near the convention center and French Quarter. By the time Hurricane Katrina hit, the hotel was so desperate for a new formula it was considering turning itself into an urban destination resort for families, and later a hotel facing a signature jazz park.
For the projects to succeed, said Jane Brooks, chairwoman of the urban planning department at the University of New Orleans, they will need to find ways to bring people into that quadrant of the city and make them feel comfortable about returning regularly.
"It's very important to think about what you're going to need to get people into that space. It's not just build it and they will come. You've got to have a reason for people to go into it. They've got to feel safe, and they've got to feel that it's a pleasant place to be," Brooks said.
The Bensons united kingdom news are looking to LA Live, a development in a formerly blighted area of downtown Los Angeles, by AEG, the company that co-manages the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. During the past decade, AEG has built a vibrant destination that includes three special event spaces, offices, hotel rooms, restaurants, clubs, movie theaters and soon, residences.
While AEG spent $2.5 billion developing these facilities, Doug Thorton, senior vice president of SMG, the company that manages the Superdome and New Orleans Arena, notes that New Orleans has many of the same types of facilities -- or the potential to create them -- around the Dome.
AEG calls its development a "live content campus," and like a juggler with three balls or the city of Las Vegas with three convention centers, it says the key to its success is having several programs each day at the 20,000-seat Staples Center, the 7,100-seat Nokia Theatre and outdoor Nokia Plaza or elsewhere in the development It has a full-time staff of programmers who organize as many as 650 events a year to keep the place busy.
Tanner acknowledged that a 72,968-seat football stadium is more challenging than working with smaller venues, but he thinks it can be done if New Orleans consciously creates activity in Champions Square, the Superdome, the New Orleans Arena and elsewhere in the area.. In fact, his company is now embarking on a project in Edmonton, Alberta, trying to do a multiuse development downtown surrounding the venue where the Edmonton Oilers hockey team plays.
Meanwhile, the Hyatt is also taking destiny into its own hands. The company is bumping up the amount of meeting space at the hotel from 115,000 square feet to 200,000 square feet, including exhibition space, so it can become its own convention hotel.
General Manager Michael Smith, who arrived at the property a year before Katrina with a mission to try to turn it around, united kingdom news said the Hyatt will be able to accommodate all types of gatherings. Between the meeting space and 21 executive boardroom facilities with concierge service, it can host groups of any size. And if the hotel wants to go after a really big group, it can add the Superdome or New Orleans Arena for event space, and bring in other hotels to host guests.
united kingdom news Since both renovations are occurring at the same time, both will look fresh. And because SMG, the company that manages the Superdome and New Orleans Arena, was actually part of Hyatt until two years ago, Smith said, there's a good blueprint for working together.
Meanwhile, both the Hyatt and Bensons said the reintroduction of their zones will benefit from the whirlwind of high-profile sporting events that will start shortly after the Hyatt's opening in fall 2011 with the NCAA men's and then women's Final Four, a BCS college football championship and the Super Bowl in 2013.
Bjorn Hanson, dean of the Tisch Center for Hospitality, Tourism and Sports Management at New York University, said the Hyatt's plan is smart because although people focus on the big citywide conventions that go to convention united kingdom news centers, the bulk of the business is really the smaller conventions that fit in hotels.
For Eckstein, the key is whether the Hyatt and the Benson sports entertainment district are able to generate new dollars coming into the city, or whether united kingdom news they'll simply capture existing spending that would have gone to other businesses in the city.