An expansion to the America’s Center in downtown St. Louis, which leaders say is long overdue, is finally underway.

“I’m ecstatic,” Kitty Ratcliffe, president of Explore St. Louis, the region’s convention and visitors commission, said at a groundbreaking ceremony Tuesday. “We’re taking a 45-year-old convention center and making it competitive with the cities that have much newer and much bigger buildings.”

The biggest part of the $210 million project is a new 72,000-square-foot exhibit space. The loading docks will be reconfigured and expanded, and a new entrance will be built at 9th Street and Martin Luther King Drive. [...]

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