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 convention and/or center:
“No good poetry is ever written in a manner twenty years old, for to write in such a manner shows conclusively that the writer thinks from books, convention and cliché, not from real life.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)