MILWAUKEE — As a longtime Milwaukee resident, I expected this summer to be a special, in a good way. In sports, the Bucks were red hot in the N.B.A.’s regular season. And in politics, the city was set to host the Democratic National Convention — with winning back Wisconsin and the rest of the Midwest from Donald Trump at the top of the Democrat’s wish list.
By February, the city and its businesses had already spent more than a year happily prepping for a late summer horde of tens of thousands of delegates, political nerds, journalists and photographers who were expected to arrive for the nomination of President Trump’s challenger, with all the attendant patriotic pageantry.
Little did we know that the coronavirus was on the brink of overtaking America, rendering all mass gatherings a public threat and the 2020 D.N.C. a largely virtual event. In online forums, some journalists have cheered the absence of an in-person convention, characterizing the tradition as trite, or even a waste of time.
But the people who truly feel as if their time has been wasted are residents of Milwaukee. After investing hundreds of millions of dollars collectively in anticipation of the event, they are dealing with a heart-rending and bank-breaking loss of business.
Mike Bilton, general manager of the Milwaukee branch of the Chicago-based steakhouse Carson’s, had to drastically change the restaurant’s plans. “A California-based tech company had rented us out for the whole week for a significant sum. We were going to be their private chefs, noon to close, every day. Instead we’re throttled to 25 percent capacity inside and struggling just to keep everyone on payroll with takeout orders.”
The recently built Fiserv Forum and its attendant entertainment district, while not built specifically for the D.N.C., was designed with an eye toward drawing higher-profile concerts and conventions to the city, and was a centerpiece of our pitch to land the D.N.C. in the first place. When I stopped by the other morning, the only people around were a forlorn crew for a Dutch news channel.
“We didn’t get the memo,” a crewman told me in jest.
For the last few years, Milwaukee has been betting big money on enlivening our economy by raising our national profile through new construction to expand our convention capacity.
Three new hotels with nearly a thousand combined rooms were converted or built downtown in the last year. All anticipated 100 percent capacity throughout the convention. All of them are either near empty or closed for the duration of the Covid-19 crisis.
This pattern is repeated across the city, with new parking structures, restaurants and watering holes that opened with the expectation that there would be a windfall of $200 million in economic activity from the convention this month. New ordinances were drawn up just to accommodate the week’s worth of guests, including pushing closing times for bars from 2 to 4 a.m.
Guy Rehorst, owner of Milwaukee’s Great Lakes Distillery, expected a surge of both bar and restaurant orders, as well as guests touring his downtown distilling and bottling facility. Instead, “We had one tour of Secret Service agents over the weekend,” he said. “That was our convention spike.”
Just off Water Street, The Swingin’ Door Exchange has been a favorite hole-in-the-wall eatery and bar for locals and travelers alike since the end of Prohibition. Shelly Sincere and her husband have owned it for a decade. “We expected our biggest year ever. Not just as an independent business, but for Milwaukee as a whole,” Ms. Sincere told me. “So many people invested so much money to make this week a success, and for what?”
The convention is still technically happening, of course. But it has moved from the new sprawling arena that serves as the home court for the Milwaukee Bucks to the smaller Wisconsin Center. The drastically scaled-down live events have drawn about 2,000 visitors, a small fraction of the number who would have been attracted by the usual extravaganza.
A virtual convention is about as nourishing for its host city as a virtual bratwurst is for a hungry man. Most Milwaukeeans agree that this quasi-cancellation of the convention was the only responsible option during a pandemic that has already caused so much death. Especially at a time when Covid-19 cases are spiking again in Wisconsin, despite Gov. Tony Evers’s statewide mask mandate.
The shame is that all of this was preventable. An early and competent federal response to the pandemic could have put us on a path to recovery and reopening months ago, as has happened in most of the rest of the world. At the state level, if Governor Evers’s emergency quarantine had not been overturned by the Republican-controlled Wisconsin Supreme Court, maybe more in-person events could have taken place.
Hopefully, after considering the many millions of dollars invested here without a return, the Democratic National Committee will skip the city selection process in 2024 and give Milwaukeeans a second chance at playing host.
Patrick S. Tomlinson (@stealthygeek) is an author based in Milwaukee.
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