"Not even the same place," Cotter said. "New apartments, new restaurants. People who hadn't been downtown in the last 20 years wouldn't even recognize it."
The city is booming as leaders look ahead to a vision for the future that includes a larger, more contemporary version of the Durham Convention Center with a new hotel attached to it.
The Durham City Council heard from Hunden Partners on Thursday, who performed a feasibility study looking at all the opportunities, including renovating and expanding the existing 31,000-square-foot space.
"The issue is it's just not big enough," Discover Durham president and CEO Susan Amey said. "Right now, we're pretty much limited to one event at a time or maybe two very small ones. But in the new footprint, we could have multiple events going on at one time and really maximize the use of the capacity we'd have."
ALSO SEE: RDU unveils 3 new restaurants in airport's Terminal 2
The study suggests the City of Durham starts over with a complete rebuild, although it's unclear where it would be located.
Some business owners say they hope it remains downtown.
"That's good for us," Vishal Patel of Bulldega Urban Market said. "Business is great because it's a lot of people working and they're going to come down here and shop and hang around. So, the more people you will see ... that's good for the business."
City leaders still have a long way to go in the planning process, including more discussions about where the future site would be or how much it would cost. But as the study says the new build is projected to increase spending, earnings, jobs, room nights, and taxes exponentially, it's all a win to Amey.
"I think one of the things that is important about what a convention center does is how much it generates in terms of jobs," Amey said. "There's so many people in the community, so many businesses that benefit from having an economic driver like this ... and having a convention center with the kind of capacity that we're talking about is one of the biggest things Durham can do to invest in that kind of economic growth."