Two downtown hotels renovate and expand
The Hotel Arizona (formerly the Radisson City Center) will remodel and expand as the main Convention Center hotel with a total of 700 rooms, adding a retail center and second tower, while the Santa Rita Hotel is downsizing to 66 rooms, but adding 148 condos, plus street-level retail and restaurant space.
Hotels follow different paths in redevelopment
By Philip S. Moore, Inside Tucson Business
Posted: Sunday, Oct 30, 2005 - 04:01:10 pm MST
Bigger or boutique. Looking to the future of what downtown is to become through Río Nuevo, two downtown hotels are going through transformations. But what they will become will be as different as the guests they’re seeking to attract.
The landmark Santa Rita Hotel, 88 E. Broadway, and the former Radisson City Center, now named the Hotel Arizona, 181 W. Broadway, are both scheduled for extensive renovation. The first will become smaller, tailoring itself to the specialty market, while the latter is preparing to double in size, to be the leading convention hotel for the city’s planned convention-arena complex.
Owner HSL Properties, the Tucson-based developer of many apartment complexes, is redeveloping each of the hotels to meet the company’s expectations for the future of downtown and the people who’ll be coming there.
Architect Kevin Howard is developing the plans for both the Santa Rita and Hotel Arizona. He said the half-dozen blocks between them has made a big difference in the choice of design.
The Hotel Arizona “wants to be a component of the civic plaza,” he said. “That means designing it to be the living room for downtown with a contemporary feel that speaks to the future and says Tucson’s time has come.”
By contrast, the Santa Rita is being designed to emphasize Tucson’s history. “The first thing the reconstruction project will do is peel away a poorly done 1970s remodeling job to bring it back to its historic appearance, in all its glory,” Howard said. “Along with that, we’re redesigning the entire block, so that the new parts will be upbeat and contemporary, but stay in keeping with the scale and historic nature of the hotel.”
First shedding its Radisson affiliation,
the Hotel Arizona has started the renovation process that will ultimately transform the entire huge block that includes La Placita Village and the Tucson Convention Center. A new tower is planned, increasing the total number of rooms from 310 to 700. The hotel’s 30-year-old meeting, restaurant and retail space will be renovated and augmented by a new glassed-in skybridge retail center.
According to Tom Tracy, president of The Lodging Company in Tucson and asset manager of the hotel during the transition,
the reconstruction work will start in 2006 and continue in stages over the next several years, going a long way toward meeting Río Nuevo’s plans for 1,100 new first-class guest rooms by 2010.
“We want to proceed in conjunction with what the city’s doing with the arena and convention center,” Tracy said. “This is part of our strategic long-term plan for this property. So, as soon as we’re finished completing the financing package, we’re ready to go.”
The decision to cancel the management agreement with Radisson came sooner than expected as a result of an opt-out clause, Tracy said “but we’d already decided that the best course was to leave the Radisson franchise group, in order for us to be free to determine what affiliation, if any, would be appropriate for the future.”
He says “everyone feels confident of our ability to compete as an independent.”
If the strategy of the Hotel Arizona is to expand to serve a planned growth in convention business,
the plans for the 161-room Santa Rita is to get a lot smaller, to recapture the hotel’s past elegance and attract a new type of patron as either shorter-term guest or long-term resident.
The Santa Rita is currently closed. It had been operating as the Clarion Santa Rita by Choice Hotels International. A partnership between Pathway Developments, another Tucson-based residential and commercial property developer, and HSL Properties is preparing to reduce the number of rooms to just 66, making it smaller than the 86-room Arizona Inn and about twice the size of the 35-room Lodge on the Desert.
Additionally, through new construction and remodeling there will also be about 148 condominiums, along with 15,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space, and five floors of parking.
“We’re still in the review process with the city, but we’ll definitely be remodeling the hotel in such a way as to go back to its 1930s glamour,” said April Ortiz, spokeswoman for Pathway. “We want the hotel to be operated on a smaller scale. We want to emphasize the historic character of the place while incorporating pedestrian open space areas and a strong retail front on Broadway.”
Ortiz said Pathway and HSL expect the plans to be approved in the next few months, so that a construction schedule can be established that will allow work to begin next year.
“As far as when we’ll be finished, I don’t think anybody knows that, yet,” Ortiz said. “We’ll know more when we have completed construction documents.”
The current Hotel Arizona (former Radisson):
Renderings for the renovated Santa Rita Hotel and condos:
