The Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center (originally the San Antonio Convention Center) is a convention center in Downtown San Antonio, Texas, USA along the banks of the River Walk.
The facility is the central component of the city’s successful convention industry. The Center, named for the late U.S. congressman Henry Barbosa González, hosts more than 300 events each year with over 750,000 convention delegates from around the world.
The original convention center was built as part of HemisFair '68 by a joint venture of two general contractors Darragh & Lyda Inc. of San Antonio, Texas and H. A. Lott Inc. of Houston, Texas, but has been significantly altered and expanded since then. Today it is a 1,300,000 square feet (120,000 m2) state-of-the-art facility with 203,000 sq ft (18,900 m2) of meeting space, 3 ballrooms, 4 contiguous exhibit halls over 440,000 sq ft (41,000 m2) and the adjacent 2,500-seat Lila Cockrell Theatre, a performing arts venue, which is part of the original construction.
A new 1,003-room convention center hotel and condominium tower, the Grand Hyatt San Antonio, designed by the renowned architecture firm Arquitectonica, opened in 2009.
Famous quotes containing the words henry, convention and/or center:
“The higher the state of civilization, the more completely do the actions of one member of the social body influence all the rest, and the less possible is it for any one man to do a wrong thing without interfering, more or less, with the freedom of all his fellow-citizens.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“No convention gets to be a convention at all except by grace of a lot of clever and powerful people first inventing it, and then imposing it on others. You can be pretty sure, if you are strictly conventional, that you are following genius—a long way off. And unless you are a genius yourself, that is a good thing to do.”
—Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879–1944)
“I am the center of the world, but the control panel seems to be somewhere else.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)