Muldoon retiring as city tourism chief

Tom Muldoon, who helped guide the Pennsylvania Convention Center from a concept into a reality, will retire next year as president of the Philadelphia Convention and Visitors Bureau, the agency announced today.

When he leaves on Dec. 31, 2010, he will be succeeded by Jack Ferguson, the bureau's executive vice president.

The bureau, a private, nonprofit organization, is the city's official tourism-promotion agency.

Muldoon has led the city's convention and tourism efforts for 24 years, during which he created the Philadelphia Sports Congress, the Multicultural Affairs Congress, and the Greater Philadelphia Life Sciences Congress. Each of those is a division of the bureau and tries to bring visitors in those fields to the area.

"Tom Muldoon has been an important part of the fabric of Philadelphia for so many years," Mayor Nutter said in a statement. "One of his biggest legacies is his role in the Pennsylvania Convention Center. Tom helped initially to get it built, and now he is helping to improve it."

The center, which opened in 1993, is undergoing construction of an $786 million expansion, which is to be completed in 2011. This will give the center a 60 percent increase in floor space, bringing the total to about a million square feet of exhibit and meeting space.

Muldoon, who became the bureau's president in 1985, was also a key in making Philadelphia the main home for the annual Army-Navy football every fall.

Ferguson, 61, who also will take on the title of chief executive, will continue leading the bureau's sales and service operations during the transition, it said. A national search for his successor in that role is to begin in March.

A Philadelphia native, he joined the bureau in 2003.