By Randy Tucker
The Cincinnati Enquirer

The annual downtown JazzFest was once the centerpiece of an event-filled weekend that attracted tens of thousands of out-of-town visitors and generated millions of dollars for shop owners, restaurateurs and hotel operators.

It brought downtown Cincinnati to life in July with nattily clad festivalgoers, fancy cars and crowded bars and nightclubs that made the metropolitan area the place to be for a weekend.

Jazz festival fans - and those who benefit from it - had their hearts torn out by Thursday's announcement that the show is being moved to Detroit because corporate sponsors and artists are hesitant to come to Cincinnati during the boycott.

"It's a shame the way things are going,'' said Gus Miller, who has operated Batsakes Hat Shop in downtown Cincinnati for more than 50 years. "I know we've got problems. But if the right people would put their heads together, we could solve the problems. This doesn't solve anything. It just hurts the little guy.''

Although jazz festival attendance began to dwindle in the late 1990s, it remained one of the biggest revenue-generating weekends for many small businesses.

"Ten to 15 years ago, the JazzFest was like Christmas in July,'' Miller said. "We did a tremendous business, and I used to always make sure there was a lot of extra inventory on hand.''

The festival was last held in Cincinnati in 2001. But because it followed that spring's riots, attendance was poor and the festival lost $550,000, according to Joe Santangelo, whose family has produced the JazzFest since 1962.

Last year, Santangelo canceled JazzFest for the first time, partly because of artist cancellations related to the post-riot economic boycott.

The end of JazzFest and the 18-month-old boycott that brought its demise has already cost an already struggling downtown economy more than $10 million. The festival alone brought more than $5 million to the downtown economy, according to a 2000 report by the University of Cincinnati.

And small businesses weren't the only ones who felt the loss of the JazzFest.

In 2000 and 2001, hotel occupancy rates in Greater Cincinnati jumped nearly 25 percent in July.

From July 28-30, 2000, the average hotel occupancy rate in Greater Cincinnati was 77 percent, and from July 20-22, 2001, the average occupancy rate was 73.5 percent, according to Tennessee-based Smith Travel Research.

The region's average hotel occupancy rate in July fell to about 50 percent last summer, the first summer without the event in Cincinnati.

Most hotel operators said they didn't expect the JazzFest to return this year and didn't reserve rooms for festival patrons.

"After we got burned on it (reserving hotel rooms) last year, we weren't going to reserve more rooms this year,'' said Rob Gauthier, general manager of the Millennium Hotel downtown, "We just booked right through it.''

Gauthier said he has targeted other "market segments" to fill the rooms that would have been reserved for JazzFest patrons.

But he acknowledged it would be hard to replace the business generated by the JazzFest.

"When you have a festival that brings that many people downtown, it's going to have an impact,'' Gauthier said.

E-mail rtucker@enquirer.com