Roland E. Powell Convention Center

The take

Four buildings on one site, across forty-seven years. A faction argued in 1960 that a hall "would help the economy more than liberalised beverage laws"; the town contracted for Trimper Heirs land at $45,000 in 1964; the State appropriated $1,250,000 in 1966 on condition the town found the site, and the town put it at 39th Street, in the half of itself it had annexed in 1957. It opened on 18 April 1970 with two governors on the platform and cost $3 million. In 1995 the town borrowed to double it, on the arithmetic that a $1.4 million operating deficit shared with Annapolis beats the $824,000 it already carried alone. It expanded again in 2011. Phase 3, bonded in 2017, cost $34.4 million — eleven times the original building — with $20.4 million from the State and the town's share still coming from the food tax invented in the 1990s to pay for it.