Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 29, 1995 TAG: 9501300061
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: D1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAN CASEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Last week, at the Hotel Roanoke:
Room doors are stacked like pancakes in the famed Regency Room. The entrance to the kitchen is blocked by yellow tape, the kind police use at crime scenes. A pallet of boxed toilets sits in the richly paneled lobby, just inside the front door.
The unfinished interior looks as if it had been designed by someone with a fetish for iron scaffolding. Up on top, workers screw sheets of gypsum board onto a skeleton-like framework of steel studs. A thin layer of dust covers everything.
Outside, bulldozers rumble over the driveway - a huge, curbless dirt rut. Almost 400 construction workers are clambering around the property, laying tile, setting sinks, installing electric lines, moving earth.
Roanoke's century-long love affair with the Tudor-style landmark is supposed to be rekindled April3. Given the work that's left to be done, is it any wonder that questions about whether it will be ready keep popping up?
``Are you sure it's going to be finished on time?'' Hotel Roanoke and Conference Center Commission members grilled a manager for general contractor Faison & Associates during a Nov.17 construction update.
``I'm going to have a hard time understanding how they're going to open the Hotel Roanoke in 100 days,'' Mayor David Bowers opined at the Dec.19 City Council meeting, one week after members toured the hotel and conference center complex. ``But they say it's ... on schedule.''
``Absolutely. Absolutely, there was that question,'' council member Elizabeth Bowles recalls of council's tour. ``When you walk through and see the thing, there seems to be so much to do yet.''
Not to worry, says David van Blaricom, project manager for Faison.
The jitters are understandable. A lot is riding on the hotel and conference center, the linchpin of downtown economic development efforts.
Missing the opening date would redden a lot of faces around town. After years of effort and more than $42million, nobody involved wants to get off to a bad start.
The city has started making plans for a month's worth of festivities to mark the opening, beginning Saturday, April1. A public tour is expected to draw thousands of people between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m.
April 3 is the date of the hotel's ``soft opening,'' which launches a 31/2-week ``get-out-the-kinks'' phase during which the staff gets acclimated to the paying guests and diners, and any needed finishing touches are put on the interior. Some sort of ceremony is planned at the hotel entrance.
The grand opening comes April 29, a hotel dedication ceremony featuring bigwigs from state and local government, Virginia Tech and Norfolk Southern Corp., the former owners of the hotel.
A formal ball will be held that night, said Michelle Bono, the city's public information officer. Some tickets will be available to the public.
``It's almost imperative that this thing opens on the day we said it would. If you've got things planned and people booked in it, it almost has to be open,'' said James Harvey, conference center commission chairman.
Still, no carpet has been laid in the conference center; the place smells of model glue; many ceilings and some walls need to be installed; and workers warm themselves over gas-fired space heaters that look like Bunsen burners on steroids.
And yes, there's lots of painting, paving, wall work, chandelier hanging and, above all, cleaning on the agenda between now and the end of March. And the elevators don't work.
No problem.
``In a few weeks, you won't recognize this place,'' van Blaricom says.
In fact, most of the hotel's 332 rooms are finished and have furniture. Public rooms such as the lobbies, the dining areas, the ballrooms, halls and entrances are where the wrap-up takes place.
In contracting lingo, this process is called ``sequencing.'' Teams of drywall hangers put up plasterboard. Then along comes a crew of plasterers, then a crew of sanders, and finally the painters. The operation is something like the flip side of an assembly line: The workers - not the product - move along.
Van Blaricom is experienced at this sort of work. Among other major Faison projects over the years, he oversaw the construction of First Union Tower, the biggest office building in Roanoke.
``People swore you couldn't do that in 22 months. But we did, and opened when we said we would,'' he says. ``If someone walks through here and isn't used to how construction goes today, I can see how they'd think it's not going to be done. It'll be done, but it won't be done early.''
Not that there haven't been a few problems along the way.
The easy part was the conference center, a high-tech, gizmo-laden new building that's supposed to lure businessmen from across the country to the 113-year-old hotel. Among other features, the conference center sports a grand ballroom the size of a football field.
The hard part was the hotel. Some of the renovation work fell into the ``playing-it-by-ear'' category. Over the years, wings have been added onto wings, the facade has been changed. There were few, if any, master plans.
Old plaster walls don't take kindly to jackhammers, and ``there was a substantial additional amount of demolition work that we hadn't figured on,'' van Blaricom says. ``I think we thought we could save some more of the old walls.''
Coming weeks will see the advent of ``FF&E'' work, construction shorthand for furniture, fixtures and equipment. That will be performed by Doubletree Hotel Corp., contract operator of the hotel and conference center.
Doubletree General Manager Gary Walton said the hotel will begin taking room reservations in mid-February.
by CNB