Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 2, 1995 TAG: 9504150008
SECTION: HOTEL ROANOKE PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: AN ESSAY BY JEFF DeBELL STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Clearly this was not just another hotel closing. People don't cry when a Holiday Inn shuts.
Hotel Roanoke has meant something special to the Roanoke Valley since 1882, when it was built by the Norfolk and Western Railroad on what the contemporary census called a ``stubble field'' overlooking the boisterous young city's passenger station.
Borrowing the Tudor or Queen Anne style associated with Old World elegance, builders of the 38-room hotel gave the city its first architectural landmark. It was a landmark with the appearance of historical resonance if not the real thing.
``They were giving Roanoke a past it didn't have,'' said Marshall Fishwick, native Roanoker and professor of humanities at Virginia Tech. ``It was a heritage that was manufactured.''
Whatever the worth of its pedigree, the hotel quickly was adopted by Roanokers. The local German Club held its first fancy ball there a year after the opening.
From then until its closing, Hotel Roanoke was the place of choice for uncountable parties, anniversaries, romantic interludes, family dinners - the kinds of special occasions that linger in the heart and are preserved in photo albums and scrapbooks.
Out-of-towners were likewise drawn there, both as regular guests and as delegates to conventions and meetings. And they had a way of remembering it. Wherever they go - wartime Burma, a plane over South America, an Atlantic City casino - traveling Roanokers have reported being asked about ``that old hotel.''
``It must have been the honeymoon capital of the South,'' said Tom Robertson, Carillion Health System president and leader of the grass-roots fund-raising campaign to help restore the landmark.
Called Renew Roanoke, the campaign raised $7 million. It was vital to the $45-million construction/restoration effort that will culminate Monday in the hotel's reopening.
``It's woven through the entire fabric of the valley's history,'' Roanoke lawyer and state legislator Clifton ``Chip'' Woodrum, said of the hotel.
Roanoke Mayor David Bowers recalls ``running around the hotel as a young Democrat.''
``I met [former Vice President] Edmund Muskie in the men's room one night,'' he said. ``He looked like Abe Lincoln.''
Late one night during the primary campaign of 1969, Bowers recalled, ``word spread that Henry Howell was in full form up on the third floor.''
It was true. Wearing boxer shorts and a T-shirt and pushing a bellman's cart (according to Bowers), the colorful Democratic gubernatorial candidate was knocking on room doors and saying, ``This is Henry Howell and I'm here to wake up Virginia.''
``First kisses were made there,'' Woodrum said. ``You always tried to take the girl you really wanted to impress to the Regency Room. And you could see it from so many places. It kind of dominated your vision from all over the place.''
Almost anyone who talks about the hotel mentions its imposing physical prominence. It's made to sound like the man-made equivalent of Mill Mountain.
``There it was,'' Donlan Piedmont said. ``If you were in a plane you saw it. If you came in by highway, you saw it. Its presence was disproportionate to the size of the community.''
The retired head of public relations in Roanoke for Norfolk Southern Corp., which formerly owned the hotel, Piedmont is the author of ``Peanut Soup and Spoonbread: An Informal History of Hotel Roanoke.''
The book is named for two popular dishes on the menu of the Regency Room. It is packed with fond reminiscences of the hotel. It also lists the names of some 2,000 people and 390 businesses who thought enough of Hotel Roanoke to contribute to the Renew Roanoke campaign.
No wonder people wept when the hotel shut its doors. It was as though they had gathered on the hillside to bury a beloved relative.
``I've never encountered a place where a commercial institution had such ties to the city,'' Piedmont said in an interview. ``It was always thought of as our hotel by the city, not as a municipality, but as the people. It was part of the visual consciousness and the social consciousness.''
``It was just the place you went,'' Anne Hammersley said. ``It was what you did.''
Hammersley provides a good example. She was taken to the hotel as a child for family meals and celebrations. At age 14, she innocently got tipsy on wine there during a party for her older sister.
She and her husband-to-be, E. Howard Hammersley Jr., had their first date in the Regency Room. They later took their six children there. Lisa Hammersley made her first visit at the tender age of 9 months.
``She had crackers and milk and she was a perfect lady,'' her mother recalled.
And when the hotel closed and sold off thousands of its furnishings, Hammersley eagerly bought something to give each of the children. She was hardly alone. Dogwood china and other mementos of the old hotel now are in countless homes in the area.
Though a steadfast admirer of the hotel, Robert Garland had a less-positive response to the sale.
``What I saw was like a band of gypsies swarming down on their prey like killer bees,'' he said in written notes. ``I couldn't watch it as they disassembled and undressed 'her.' I left empty-handed save for my memories.''
Those memories reach into the former Roanoke city councilman's childhood, when he tagged along to conventions of the state pharmacists' association with his dad. Years later, he went as a pharmacist in his own right.
As a city official, Garland presented keys to the city to visiting dignitaries at the hotel. He helped interview city manager candidates, including the incumbent, Bob Herbert, in private rooms at the hotel.
Just for sheer sentimental love of the place, Garland rented the Virginia Room for a private party the last night the hotel was open.
Many of his reminiscences are used in Don Piedmont's book.
The hotel will reopen Monday, more than five years after Norfolk Southern Corp. gave it to Virginia Tech and the school began collaborating with the city of Roanoke on a plan to get it back into operation. Like many another grande dame, it had its face lifted while absent from the public eye.
Along with the new looks, there will be a new facet to the hotel operation: a conference center that is supposed to restore the prosperity that had faded by the time the hotel closed.
What remains to be seen is whether Roanokers' admiration for the hotel will return along with its hoped-for prosperity.
``I hope and pray that it will,'' businessman and Roanoke native Charles Lunsford said. ``We always want to recapture things that were special in the past.''
What made the relationship work in the old days, Don Piedmont says, was the ``seamless'' interface between the hotel's clientele and its staff.
It was easy to tell which was which. The customers were white and those who served them were almost all black. (Hotel Roanoke admitted its first black guest in 1964. It was gospel star Mahalia Jackson.)
``The employees made the hotel so attractive,'' Piedmont said, that customers kept coming back, thereby motivating the employees to make the hotel even more attractive.
``One thing fed on the other,'' he said.
``Everybody knew the waiters,'' said Clare White, retired woman's editor of The Roanoke Times and author of a history of Roanoke. ``They had been there forever and they had pride in what they were doing.''
As much as the service, hotel users liked the feel of the place.
``You didn't feel like you were going into a big, cold hotel,'' White said. ``It was a warm place.''
The public rooms were thickly carpeted and paneled in dark woods. Furnishings were well-made and comfortable, and murals presented scenes more evocative of ``Gone With the Wind'' than anything in a mountain railroad city.
``It was the only place in Roanoke where I ever felt like I was in the South,'' Marshall Fishwick said.
Billie H. Davis spent 47 years on the hotel staff and attained the position of banquet manager before retiring in 1989.
``I wouldn't have been there that long if it wasn't a good place to work,'' he said.
Davis was well-known to patrons of the hotel. So was assistant banquet manager Alphonso Alexander, whom most everyone called ``Alex.'' He, too, spent 47 years with the hotel before retiring when it closed.
``It was just like a family,'' he said of the hotel in its heyday. ``When I got my day off I couldn't wait for the next day so I could go back to work.''
Alexander said the family atmosphere, though always present to some degree, began to fade in the 1970s under what he politely called ``a different type of management.''
Matters were not helped during the 1980s, which were hard on the old hotel. Business declined, leaving Norfolk Southern to cover six-figure losses nearly every year.
The hotel family was trimmed by staff reductions, then sorely bruised by a six-month strike over work rules in 1983-84. It was the first in the hotel's history, and newspaper accounts typically described it as ``bitter.''
Besides dividing staff and management, the strike carried racial overtones because the workers were black and management was white. It caused hard feelings among elements of the city's black citizenry, and presented hotel patrons with the uncomfortable dilemma of whether to avoid their beloved hotel or cross the picket line at the risk of offending the help.
Strike-related resentments no doubt added to stresses at the financially beleaguered hotel. Service, lauded for so long as impeccable, occasionally was described in less-flattering terms.
If it was a time of stress at the hotel, it was a time for hard decisions by its railroad owner. Besides losing money, the hotel needed expensive improvements and there was no guarantee they would make it competitive in a market hostile to downtown hotels.
There were few signs that Roanokers loved their hotel any less. But love wasn't enough to make ends meet. In July 1989, the railroad announced it was closing the hotel and giving it to the Virginia Tech Foundation.
Tech had visions of renovating the old building and reopening it as a conference center/hotel that would emphasize corporate and professional training. Business types and city government officials saw the transaction as an economic boon. And they loved the prospect of a heightened profile for Tech in the valley.
``We're going to change this town from a blue-collar town into a university town,'' retired Norfolk and Western Railroad President John Fishwick said at the time.
The Hotel Roanoke that reopens in a few days will in some respects be the same one that closed more than five years ago, just cleaner and better-working because of the renovations. Many of the furnishings and appointments are familiar and as elegant as ever.
There are striking changes, too. The main entrance is at what used to be the rear of the building, for example, and the Crystal Ballroom has been moved. Most dramatically, a modern, high-tech conference center has been constructed and painstakingly annexed to the original building.
There is the major new business element - conferences - and, of course, there is a new proprietor. Roanoke's venerable railroad hotel now is owned by that university in Blacksburg.
``Adding Virginia Tech to the equation'' is what will make Hotel Roanoke succeed where it wasn't succeeding before, according to Brian Wishneff, acting chairman of the Hotel Roanoke Conference Center Commission.
He said the conference center will provide a ``marketing edge'' that the hotel didn't used to have.
With the addition of the center and Tech's continuing-education programs to the lodging and convention traffic, Hotel Roanoke is seen as better positioned to absorb downturns in individual facets of the operation.
The hotel itself will benefit from being run by ``a national management firm [Doubletree Hotels] with a national reservation system,'' Wishneff added.
Thanks to private contributions to the project, including $7 million raised by the grass-roots Renew Roanoke campaign, Tech will be able to accept a lower rate of return on hotel operations than would be possible had all funds come from investment capital.
``All those things, working together, we believe will make it economically viable,'' said Ray Smoot, Tech treasurer and vice president for finance.
The original Hotel Roanoke grew up with the city and the railroad. It plays like a character - not merely a setting - in local history and in the memories of many of its people.
``It's an institution," Lunsford said. ``Everybody who's a Roanoker or who has visited has either seen the hotel or been in it. And I think the association with the railroad and what the railroad did for the city makes it special.''
Will the new and improved hotel be special in the same way? Even with the Regency Room in place and peanut soup on the menu, can a university-owned conference hotel be to the city what that stately old railroad hotel on the hillside was?
``I guess it depends on the attitudes of the people who work there and the people who visit,'' Lunsford said.
by CNB