This article entitled “Dallas company plans huge medical trade center in Nashville” appeared in the Tennessean on May the 18th, 2009. The author is Naomi Snyder:
“A subsidiary the real estate conglomerate owned by the Trammell Crow family plans a medical trade center in Nashville that would rival the size of the planned Nashville convention center.
The company, Market Center Management Co., says on its web site that it could open a facility as early as next year that would eventually reach 1.5 million square feet.
Nashville city officials plan to build a convention center downtown that would be 1.2 million square feet.
Crow Holdings, the parent company of Market Center Management, already owns or manages several trade centers and shows in the U.S., Asia and Europe totaling 12 million square feet.
“MCMC’s continuing mission is to bring together a variety of manufacturers, wholesale representatives, product developers and retail buyers in a large-scale, cost-effective setting for the productive exchange of goods and services,’’ the company says on its web site.
The company operates the Dallas Market Center, a trade hall encompassing nearly 5 million square feet on a 68-acre campus. The center produces more than 200 trade shows and market events each year and has an $800 million economic impact locally, according to the company.
Crow also operates a more than 3 million square foot trade complex in Shanghai and it owns the almost 1.5 million square foot Brussels International Trade Mart in Belgium.
The Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce and the Nashville Health Care Council, which was created by the chamber to promote the health care industry in Nashville, both confirmed they were in talks with the company.
“Our feeling in general is Nashville is home to the nation’s premier health care cluster and Nashville would be ideal,’’ said Stephanie Pepper, public relations manager for the chamber.
Neither city officials nor Market Center representatives could be reached this morning.
Nashville is home to more than 300 health care related companies, 15 of them publicly traded and based in Nashville. The city also boasts Vanderbilt University and the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, one of the premier research institutions in the country, as well as HCA, making Nashville home to the largest investor-owned hospital company in the nation.”
Clearly, the Karl Dean dissenters are eating a massive size bowl of humble soup with this new announcement. It was only 3 weeks ago when the Nashville Scene shamelessly ran an anti-convention center article that came off as biased and just plain one sided. As of today, it is certainly possible that Nashville will be building 2.7 million square feet of new convention center and medical trade center space by 2012. Talk about a local recession buster! Somewhere Eisenhower is smiling in Heaven.
