Come to Brooklyn, it’s just next-door to Manhattan!
Mayor de Blasio’s administration on Saturday made a sales pitch to more than 50 members of the Democratic National Committee to hold the party’s 2016 convention at Barclays Center in Brooklyn.
Marty Markowitz, a top city tourism official, addressed the delegation at the Westin New York Grand Central hotel in Midtown.
If the city wins the convention, most of the delegates will have to stay at hotels like the New York Grand Central, rather than in Brooklyn.
“Brooklyn’s inventory, while increasing significantly, will not have enough hotel rooms for all the delegates and their families for the actual convention,” Markowitz acknowledged to the Daily News.
But Markowitz insisted Brooklyn’s “it” factor still got across to the roughly 60 Democratic Party bigwigs who were in town.
“I spoke about how Brooklyn is the epicenter of cool,” he said.
According to the DNC’s guidelines for the host city, Brooklyn falls dramatically short in the lodging department, a Daily News analysis found.
The DNC requires that the host city have at least three “full-service” hotels with “at least 700 rooms and 100 suites in close proximity to the convention complex,” according to letters it sent to prospective bidders.
The hotels would serve as the convention, candidate and media headquarters.
But not one Brooklyn hotel meets this requirement, The News found. The largest Brooklyn hotel is the New York Marriott at the Brooklyn Bridge on Adams St. — but it falls short of the required space with 668 rooms and a paltry 28 suites. It’s 12 blocks from Barclays Center.
The DNC also requires that the host city have 17,000 to 18,000 rooms in “full-service hotels” located within 30 minutes of the convention site.
The Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce counts the borough as having 36 lodging establishments with only 3,500 rooms. At least 400 of those rooms are in hotels that are poorly rated by visitors to TripAdvisor.com, The News found.
The number of available hotels and rooms soars once establishments in Manhattan are counted.
Whether they would be close enough to Barclays Center to satisfy the DNC remains to be seen.
The DNC declined to comment when The News asked about this.
De Blasio’s office was confident the need would be met.
“With more than 300 hotels and over 100,000 hotel rooms to choose from, New York City will ensure that every elected official, delegate, sponsor and guest of the convention will be accommodated,” mayoral spokeswoman Marti Adams told The News.
The mayor’s office has said at least 3,500 suitable hotel rooms would be available in Brooklyn for the convention, when hotels under construction with a total of nearly 1,000 rooms are counted.
EDITORS NOTE: This story has been corrected to reflect that the DNC delegation scheduled the meeting at the Westin Grand Center Hotel in Manhattan. The de Blasio administration did not arrange for the gathering to be held there.
