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The recently-opened
Renaissance Grand Hotel and the development as a whole is
a boon to the hotel industry, but even more importantly
has catalyzed redevelopment of a whole neighborhood. |
A CATALYST FOR DOWNTOWN
REDEVELOPMENT
The Renaissance
Grand Hotel:
There’s Not Another One Like It.
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BY PETER DOWNS
One can hear the pride and excitement in Traci Russell’s voice as
she talked about opening the new Renaissance Grand Hotel in St.
Louis. “There is not another project like it going on in the country,”
she raves. Most convention hotels are functional, but not much more.
The Renaissance Grand Hotel in St. Louis combines modern facilities
and amenities with the restored elegance and 1920s opulence of the
historic Statler Hotel. Unlike other convention hotels, “this one
has a lot of character and old world charm,” Russell says fondly.
The $265 million convention hotel project developed by Historic
Restoration, Inc. (HRI) in partnership with Kimberly-Clark Corporation
restored the grandeur of the original Statler Hotel, which won national
design awards when it opened in 1917, while making it even grander
with a deftly designed addition that brings the hotel’s room total
up to 918, including 42 suites. The original building sat vacant
for 13 years after becoming damaged in a fire.
Both terra cotta ornamentation on the exterior and intricate plasterwork
on the interior were carefully and expertly restored. The original
milk glass and aluminum lobby skylight now overlooks Capri, a three-story
atrium Mediterranean-style restaurant. The original chandeliers
in the famous rooftop Crystal Ballroom were replicated, and the
ballroom’s 22-foot-high windows and ornate balustrades were lovingly
restored.
“The
addition of these rooms downtown will allow us to
book more simultaneous, overlapping, and back-to-back
conventions.”
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Carol
Moody
president,
St. Louis Convention
and Visitors Commission
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“People are in awe of the beauty,” says Ronald Silverman, senior
vice president and regional manager of HRI, of reactions to the
Renaissance Grand, which opened on February 15, 2003.
A new ballroom facility, joined to the hotel by an underground concourse,
houses the 20,200-square-foot Majestic Ballroom, which provides
table seating for up to 1,700 guests. The Irish-made carpet is said
to be the largest nonrepeating carpet ever loomed. The new ballroom
facility, with a total of 30 meeting rooms, also features an 11,000-square-foot
Landmark ballroom.
According to Carol Moody, president of the St. Louis Convention
and Visitors Commission, convention planners around the country
were waiting for this hotel to open before they took a look at St.
Louis. “The addition of these rooms downtown will allow us to book
more simultaneous, overlapping, and back-to-back conventions,” she
says. “With more than one headquarters hotel (the Adam’s Mark is
the other), we can accommodate more groups needing 1,000 to 1,500
rooms on their peak night. America’s Center can already accommodate
more than one convention of that size.”
Since 2000, developers have increased the supply of hotel rooms
downtown by 67 percent, adding 2,000 new rooms to the existing base
of 3,000, and almost all the new rooms are in historic landmarks.
“One of the very important things convention planners look for is
hotel rooms in close proximity to the convention center so they
can reduce shuttle bus costs,” Moody says. “With the Renaissance
Grand, we can commit a minimum of 5,000 hotel rooms downtown to
any one convention, or two or three, as opposed to 3,000 and the
rest at the airport or Westport. We now have conventions booked
out as far as 2012, and tentative bookings through 2015, and we’ve
had convention planners tell us they would not even be looking at
St. Louis if not for that hotel.”
"If
we go from 33 meetings to 60 meetings a year, that
is another 100 nights of business for downtown restaurants."
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Michael
Jones
executive director,
St. Louis Regional Empowerment Zone
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Michael Jones, executive director of the St. Louis Regional Empowerment
Zone and a certified sports fan, credited the Renaissance Grand
with helping St. Louis land two NCAA Final Four tournaments, in
2004 and 2005. “We always had the convention center, but we never
had a chance at those before,” he says.
“We’re at a really good point,” he adds. “The number of hotel rooms
we have now supports a convention center the size of America’s Center.”
The convention hotel project actually is more than one hotel, and
its importance to downtown goes beyond the hotel industry. The project
consisted of work on three other buildings in addition to the Renaissance
Grand. The historic Lennox Hotel adjacent to America’s Center was
renovated into a 165-room Renaissance St. Louis Suites Hotel. The
Lennox, which opened in 1929, was designed by Preston Bradshaw,
the architect of the House and Senate Buildings in Washington, D.C.
HRI carefully restored the lobby’s marble floor, patched and replaced
its dark mahogany woodwork, restored and sealed bronze elevator
doors, and refurbished the extensive plaster ornamentation. Both
the Lennox and Statler buildings are on the National Register of
Historic Places.
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The
restored elegance and 1920s opulence is captured in
the lobby and three-story atrium restaurant.
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The Renaissance St. Louis Suites hotel sits across Washington Ave.
from the Renaissance Grand and adjacent to America’s Center itself.
Across Ninth Street from the Grand is the hotel’s new ballroom and
meeting center. Behind it, HRI developed a new 10-story garage for
880 cars, with first floor retail space.
This four-building project has catalyzed redevelopment of a whole
neighborhood. Across Tenth Street from the meeting center, HRI renovated
the historic Merchandise Mart building. The massive one-time warehouse
building, which takes up a whole city block, now houses 213 apartments
and first floor retail space. Further up Washington Avenue, other
developers are turning other vacant century-old warehouses and factories
into living spaces, linking the convention center development to
an established area of loft conversions four blocks away. A $17.5
million streetscape project is intended to further strengthen that
activity.
One block behind the Renaissance Grand, the Old Post Office district
is seeing signs of new life, too. Construction workers are converting
old office space into living space, and there are plans for a boutique
hotel and, in the Old Post Office itself, for an urban campus for
Webster University.
“That wouldn’t be happening without the Renaissance Grand,” Silverman
says.
“We wanted a project that would be catalytic for downtown redevelopment,”
says Jones, who, as deputy mayor of development for Mayor Clarence
Harmon, championed HRI’s convention hotel proposal. A competing
proposal from Mesirow Stein and Hilton Hotels to convert St. Louis
Centre and the attached Dillard department store building into a
convention hotel reminded Jones of Detroit’s Renaissance Center.
“It is a great building,” he says, “but a terrible one for an urban
center, because it keeps everyone off the street...HRI had a neighborhood
redevelopment approach. It got people on the street, which is the
key to getting energy downtown.”
RCGA president and CEO Dick Fleming, a member of the mayor's selection
committee, which picked the HRI team notes, “Pres Kabacoff and his
HRI team presented an opportunity to revitalize an entire district,
in addition to producing a competitive convention headquarters hotel
for St. Louis.”
He further notes, “This development is another vivid illustration
of the return on investment of Missouri’s Historic Preservation
Tax Credits, without which, this private investment would not have
occurred.”
The Renaissance Grand also boosts downtown residential development,
Jones says. Thousands of apartments and condominiums are under construction
or planned in downtown, but to actually attract residents, downtown
will have to offer services residents want. The Renaissance Grand
creates a base for those services. “If we go from 33 meetings to
60 meetings a year, that is another 100 nights of business for downtown
restaurants,” Jones says. “If a restaurateur looking at downtown
sees there is only traffic for 100 nights of business a year, that
is not enough to locate downtown. But if the traffic there is traffic
for 200 nights a year, it makes sense. Once you have restaurants
and nightspots open downtown, someone can say ‘if I lived downtown,
I’d have access to these restaurants.’ It really does take a synergy
of residents, businesses, and travelers to get energy downtown.”
“It
will be a social gathering place, like hotels along
Michigan Avenue in Chicago or Madison and Fifth Avenues
in New York. That’s something we haven’t had. It will
be the place to go before or after a game, or before
or after a movie or show.”
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Ronald Silverman
senior vice president and
regional manager, HRI
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The hotel can become a catalyst for neighborhood redevelopment because
it is always open, 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week, Silverman
says. The Renaissance Grand will have a Starbucks, a three-meal-a-day
restaurant, and the Grand Lobby bar. “It can become a meeting and
greeting place for people downtown,” Silverman says. “It will be
a social gathering place, like hotels along Michigan Avenue in Chicago
or Madison and Fifth Avenues in New York. That’s something we haven’t
had. It will be the place to go before or after a game, or before
or after a movie or show.”
The Renaissance Grand has salespeople operating from Philadelphia,
Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington DC. They are booking conventions
from planners who never looked at St. Louis before, and they hope
to grow the business more each year.
“We have the ability to draw new business to St. Louis, but the
revitalization effort has to continue. People planning conventions
look at the quality of the headquarters hotel and the quality of
the convention center, but they also look at restaurants in the
area and things to do.” That means, Moody says, that the hotel should
not be the end, but only the beginning.
Peter Downs is a St. Louis-based freelance writer. |
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