Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 00:52:00

One Civic Center Plaza has been the address where El Paso gathers since 1974. The Judson F. Williams Convention Center - named for the former mayor and universally shortened to the El Paso Convention Center - anchors the downtown civic campus it shares with the Abraham Chavez Theatre, whose sombrero-shaped silhouette is one of the city's visual signatures, a few blocks from the Santa Fe Street international bridge to Ciudad Juarez. A 20-million-dollar expansion and renovation in 2002 gave the building its modern shape: 133,000 square feet of usable space, headlined by 80,000 square feet of column-free exhibit hall that divides into three halls and can seat up to 8,000 for general sessions and concerts. Around it sit 17 breakout rooms, roughly 15,000 square feet of dedicated meeting space, and three lobbies totalling 38,000 square feet, the main one alone bigger than many hotel ballrooms. A 975-space garage sits underneath. The centre earns its keep as the region's all-purpose big room: trade shows, quinceanera expos, comic cons, boxing cards, graduation ceremonies and the Sun Bowl Fan Fiesta all rotate through, alongside the association conventions that fill the surrounding hotels. ASM Global operates the complex for the city, and the El Paso streetcar stops directly outside, linking the campus to the Cincinnati Avenue entertainment district and the border crossing. The building sits at the centre of the city's biggest downtown investment debate. A 2019 study recommended a 30,000-square-foot ballroom and expanded meeting space, and through 2025 the city spent about eight million dollars assembling the entire block across the street - between Overland, San Antonio, Leon and Chihuahua Streets - to stage a major expansion, while long-running plans for an adjacent arena have cycled through sites around the Duranguito neighbourhood. For event-goers the practicalities are painless by big-city standards: the garage and surrounding lots put parking within a block, the pedestrian core of downtown - San Jacinto Plaza, the Plaza Theatre, the Paso del Norte hotel - is a five-minute walk, and the airport is fifteen minutes up the road. It remains the only facility of its scale for 250 miles in any direction.