How the New York auto show gets put together

This Friday, the New York International Auto Show opens for the 113th time at the Jacob Javits Center in Manhattan. The event features more than 1,000 cars, including 60 making their North American or world debuts.

While the show is open for just ten days, the planning and preparation for it is a year-round process. The show is organized by the Greater New York Automobile Dealers Association, which represents new-car dealerships throughout the area that total more than $23 billion in sales, deliver more than $1.7 billion in sales tax revenue and employ some 60,000 people.

For these dealers, the event is an “extraordinarily great marketing event,” according to Mark Schienberg, who has served as president of the GNYADA since 1988.

But it’s also an important event for the automobile industry as a whole. There are events, conferences and seminars surrounding the show that distinguish the event from others in North America and make it an even bigger draw. As a result, last year, the New York International Auto Show brought in $255 million to the city, according to Schienberg.

Just days before the show, Schienberg, a Queens native, took some time to speak with Newsday.com about the event. See the interview, condensed and edited for space, below.

Manufacturers that do have debuts, and want to do world premieres on the world stage with the media that’s there, are going to try to make sure that they’re able to get big recognition. So they’ll build extraordinary exhibit spaces and put on elaborate events and that’s what makes the show so fascinating. It is the largest marketing event for the auto industry that there is and so there’s a lot at stake.

The second problem is that the Javits Center is a very successful building, but because of its size it can only do one show like ours at a time. That complicates the move-in schedule. We have to bring 14 million pounds of exhibit freight -- a city within a city -- and put together within 6½ days. We hired 700 electricians alone, not to mention all the carpenters and Teamsters. They’re building this city within a week, and we have to meet all the appropriate building codes while doing so. If we had more time and more space, that $255 million economic impact would be substantially larger.

But we’ve had so many different exciting things happen over the years. For example, we were the first show that did a ride and drive. It’s one thing to put a car on a piece of carpet and have people sit in and take a look at it, but we actually brought in -- and still do to this day because Jeep does a ride and drive -- and erected a course that goes up a mountain, if you will, a fake mountain, and over logs and water and sand so the consumer can get the feeling of how secure the vehicle is. It’s still one of the most popular events that we hold.