Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 26, 1995 TAG: 9503240067
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: F-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SANDRA BROWN KELLY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
A city, Roanoke, and a university 40 miles away, Virginia Tech, became partners to renovate a historic hotel and team it with a conference center to create a site for everything from wedding receptions to high-tech training sessions.
The $42 million project took more than six years to happen, involved a Charlotte, N.C., developer, a hotel management company from Phoenix, Ariz., a public commission to oversee it all and enough funding sources to create a three-generation family tree.
The venture was so popular with the community, however, that its Renew Roanoke Inc. fund-raising campaign attracted $7 million, $5 million of it in donations ranging from $1 up.
A Renew Roanoke office was set up in an empty storefront on Jefferson Street, and staffed by anyone willing to help. It was possible to find there a company president stuffing thank-you lapel pins into plastic envelopes to send to the givers.
For certain, there hadn't been anything like the hotel project in Roanoke ... in more than 30 years.
The other time in memory that this community has rallied like that was when it raised $3.5 million and built Community Hospital of Roanoke Valley.
The hospital project also had a painful birth after a long labor. It began in 1959, construction started in 1963 and the opening didn't come until 1967. The hospital also faced citizen controversy, uprooted residents and seemed to involve a cast of thousands.
In 1959, downtown Roanoke had four hospitals, Roanoke Memorial, Burrell, Lewis-Gale and Jefferson. Lewis-Gale and Jefferson were 50 years old and needed updating. Lewis-Gale, then on Third Street near where WSLS-Television is now, was owned by physicians; Jefferson, on Franklin Road in what is now the Old Southwest historic district, was started by a physician but had been changed to a nonprofit hospital in 1957.
The hospitals decided to merge and build a new facility with a public fund drive and federal money. Some suggested the hospitals simply merge with Roanoke Memorial, which was newer, but that idea never went far. For one thing, each hospital had its own group of doctors, and for another, some leaders believed that a second major hospital would give the community a boost toward becoming a medical center, maybe even the site for a third medical school in Virginia.
Roanoke wasn't interested either when Botetourt County officials courted the city to put the hospital in the northwest area. Botetourt even offered land, but hospital project leaders said doctors with privileges to admit patients at Roanoke Memorial and the new hospital would have to drive too far between facilities if they built in northwest.
The first site considered was in Fishburn Park near Fishburn Park Elementary School in Southwest Roanoke. Residents of the area showed up 200-strong at a council meeting to oppose a hospital in their area specifically and to oppose the development on park land in general.
With the Fishburn site out, the hospital proponents, headed by M.W. Armistead III, then president and publisher of Times-World Corp., took an option on 23 acres in Roanoke County near what is now the Kmart store on Franklin Road.
But the Franklin Road site was the suburbs, and Stuart Saunders, then president of Norfolk and Western Railway, the heart of Roanoke's economy, wanted the hospital downtown in an urban renewal area.
"He said: 'I want it downtown, and in the Downtown East area, or I won't let you solicit my employees,'" Armistead recalled last week.
"So we came downtown after the ultimatum was issued," Armistead said. "We didn't have a prayer of raising the money without Norfolk and Western."
The downtown site cost about $300,000 more than the Franklin Road land and it required demolition of turn-of-the-century homes, but Saunders got his wish and Norfolk and Western employees went over their goal of $150,000 in donations.
General Electric Co. and its employees contributed more than $140,000. A fifth-grade class at Preston Park Elementary School chipped in $25.
A $3 million hospital fund drive was announced in January 1962 and invitations to an informal kickoff dinner pointed out the "dire need" for "immediate financing and construction" of a hospital.
Companies allowed donations through payroll deduction and held employee meetings to encourage participation. In three months, the campaign had $1 million; in six months, it was at $3.25 million. The money came from citizen donations, federal funds through the Hill Burton Act for communities that needed to catch up on hospital construction idled during World War II, plus donations from the Jefferson and Lewis-Gale doctors.
In September 1963, the project bid came in at $7.9 million. Eventually the cost grew to $9.6 million, partly because the site was found to have underground caverns. Also there were delays when the building's support columns had to be replaced because the original ones weren't built to specifications.
While the project progressed, the Lewis-Gale doctors, who had paid their pledges for the new hospital, also decided to keep their old hospital open.
Within a year of Community's 1967 opening, Lewis-Gale was wooed by Salem, which didn't have a hospital. The former Roanoke-based hospital became part of Hospital Corporation of American, and its doctors formed Lewis-Gale Clinic and relocated to the current Salem site on Virginia 419.
Also, Roanoke Memorial announced an expansion. And more than 20 years later, in 1990, Community merged with Roanoke Memorial, now both part of Carilion Health System, one of the state's largest hospital companies.
A review of the hospital experience doesn't diminish the hotel-conference center effort, but shows that Roanoke has had the spirit before. Tom Robertson, CEO of Carilion who led the hotel fund drive, said it was so successful because the project had the right combination of "nostalgia and sound business reasons."
However, Armistead thinks the hospital drive was the city's first grassroots awakening, which means this kind of groundswell of support appears to only happen every 30 years.
We do it so well, it's a shame we don't do it more often.
Sandra Brown Kelly covers consumer issues and health and medicine.
by CNB