When the Convention Center South Hall was built in 2005, the big blue circus tent (pictured below) was never designed to be a permanent fixture. This land has been earmarked for a convention center expansion and potentially another hotel for quite some time. Now there is an actual reference to that project--and no this isn't an April Fool's joke.
As part of the Silicon Valley Business Journal's "Future of Downtown San Jose" event last week, the mayor stated:
"If we want to go attract big events, we need to eventually expand the convention center and add a headquarters hotel where someone could take down 800 rooms at a time," Mahan said. "That’s something I’m looking to pursue with all of you in the years ahead."
If this happens during his term this would be an enormous win for San Jose. It would attract bigger conferences while being able to better support world class events such as the Super Bowl and World Cup, both coming to the South Bay in 2026.
As for the hotel reference, the San Jose Fairmont including the annex had 805 rooms total, and that was the largest hotel in Silicon Valley. San Francisco has several hotels much larger that that, including the Hilton San Francisco with 1,900 rooms and the Parc 55 with 1,000... both of which have gone bankrupt with the change in San Francisco's popularity recently.
A flagship brand as scale directly connected to an expanded convention center and a block away from the artsy SoFA District would be a major boon to Downtown and draw conferences not only from other parts of Northern California but across the country.
