New expo center at state fair will have Rochester builder

Diana Louise Carter//December 22, 2017//

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A Rochester construction firm has won a contract to build a 136,000-square-foot exposition center at the New York State Fairgrounds, state officials announced this week.

The state awarded the nearly $63 million, design-and-build contract to HBP Joint Venture, a partnership between The Pike Company in Rochester and Hueber Brewer Construction Co. of Syracuse.

State officials say the building in Geddes, Onondaga County, will be the largest event space north of New York City between Boston and Cleveland. Work began this week and completion is expected before the opening of the 2018 fair in late August.

The expo center will have 110,000 square feet of exhibition space that can hold as many as 500 booth exhibitors, as well as 4,000 retractable seats.

“The new Expo Center will give us all the tools for a major year-round events business,” said the fair’s acting director, Troy Waffner. “As soon as the building was announced, we began to get interest from potential users. We will capitalize on that interest and deliver the promised benefits to Central New York.”

Commented state Commissioner of Agriculture Richard A. Ball: “This blending of new facilities with the Fairgrounds’ historic structures will prove to be an industry leader and a tool for growth in the region.”

Renovations to the fairgrounds, undertaken in 2015 in part as an economic revitalization strategy for the Syracuse area, included a year-round recreational vehicle park and creating the space for this expo center. Besides construction of the expo center, the second phase of the plan includes paving the fair’s largest parking lot. The Department of Agriculture and Markets recently issued a request for proposals to market both the new center and existing buildings at the fairgrounds for events at other times than the fair itself. The 2018 fair runs from Aug. 22 to Sept. 3.

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