Conventions: The Cost of the New Chicago Fire

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Few Out-of-Towners? The real, long-term economic damage was done to Chicago itself. Following housewares, 31 other major shows were scheduled at McCormick Place in coming months. Some 1,300,000 out-of-towners would have attended Chicago exhibitions this year, contributing close to $325 million to the city's economy through their spending for rooms, meals, taxis, entertainment and purchases. The McCormick Place disaster may cut the take considerably.

By offering other facilities, the Chicago Convention Bureau by week's end had salvaged for sure 13 of the 31 scheduled exhibitions and expected to keep most of the rest. The bureau may have been whistling in the dark. Even while the wreckage smoldered, representatives of at least a dozen other convention-seeking cities flew into town. First they offered condolences. Then they set out to see how many lucrative conventions could be lured away to such places as Louisville, New York, Atlantic City and Houston.

Chicago's Democratic Mayor Richard J. Daley, meanwhile, had another big, related problem. One of the mayor's first postfire acts was to appoint a panel to determine why a six-year-old exhibition hall that had been built to outlast the Colosseum had no sprinkler systems or fire walls, and had burned down. Wondering also were such insurance companies as Travelers, Continental, and Interstate Fire & Casualty, who had written $29,650,000 worth of insurance on McCormick Place on the say-so of their own inspectors, who estimated its maximum probable fire loss at less than 1% of the building's value.