TAMPA, Fla. (AP) -When the Super Bowl came to Tampa in 2001, the city used the occasion to pitch its historic Latin quarter – Ybor City – a once booming cigar town that had undergone a dramatic facelift.
As tourists swooped into town, they found stylish clubs and restaurants in Ybor’s ornate buildings. A movie theater, retail shops and Hilton Hotel were all in place along the neighborhood’s cobblestone streets.
Other cities also have spruced up neighborhoods and buffed their image with promotional campaigns when they got the big game. Detroit tried to shift its reputation as a gritty manufacturing hub to a hip urban epicenter in 2006. Last year, Glendale, Ariz., used the Super Bowl to solidify its standing as a budding sports town. Jacksonville aimed to boost its profile in a state crowded with more popular tourist destinations.
But do such efforts work? Are they worth the millions of dollars that get invested in Super Bowl week?
otherwise overlook their locale. But academics who study Super Bowls say there’s no evidence to suggest that’s true.
“Yes, you get exposure,” said Phil Porter, a University of South Florida economics professor. “But it’s not invaluable and it’s certainly not like advertising.” In other words, he said, when the news media comes to town, the cameras don’t always catch well-toned sunbathers laying out beneath a crystal-blue sky.
Tampa isn’t looking for an image transformation this time around, but it has used the three previous Super Bowls it hosted to highlight its proximity to white-sand beaches, active nightlife and history as an enclave of immigrants. Hosting Super Bowls has also helped the city win other sporting events, like last year’s NCAA women’s basketball finals.
“Other sporting events come because people know if you were able to handle the Super Bowl, you can handle just about anything,” Tampa Mayor Pam Iorio said.
When the Super Bowl went to Jacksonville in 2005, the city undertook a variety of initiatives to spice up its bland image – putting in restaurants, bars and shops on Bay Street and lighting up its bridges at night. Granted, there still weren’t enough hotel rooms for all the guests – cruise ships were brought in for that – but officials say the city’s transformation has had a lasting effect.
g tourism period as well,” said Jerry Mallot, executive vice president of the Jacksonville Regional Chamber of Commerce.
Detroit and Glendale also undertook substantial projects leading up to their Super Bowls. Millions were invested in Detroit’s downtown, riverfront and corporate development.
In Glendale, a $455 million stadium opened two years before the game, along with a hockey arena, and spring baseball training facilities for the Dodgers and White Sox.
Business leaders and city officials claim these efforts were well worth their cost.
“The element of community pride cannot be short measured,” Glendale City Manager Ed Beasley said.
The amount of attention the city received on television during the Super Bowl is equivalent to having spent $27 million in advertising, said Julie Frisoni, assistant deputy city manager of Glendale.
Before the game, she said people would often confuse Glendale with the California city by the same name.
“I’ve rarely, if ever, heard that anymore,” Frisoni said.
But Porter said researchers have found no evidence that, over time, the game brings in more tourism, business or family relocations.
Hotels get a boost at Super Bowl time, but most of their revenue goes out of state to their corporate headquarters, he said.
Donald Ratajczak, a retired economics professor and consultant, said Super Bowls don’t give cities as big a lift as say, the Olympics, because they aren’t correlated as strongly with the game.
“Quite frankly,” he said, “most people are thinking Super Bowl first and Tampa second.”
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