Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 2, 1995 TAG: 9504150013
SECTION: HOTEL ROANOKE PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: STORIES BY SANDRA BROWN KELLY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Each year before Christmas, Ray Smoot, his wife and children came from Blacksburg to spend a weekend at Hotel Roanoke, and go to see "the real-looking" Santa Claus that used to hold forth at Heironimus department store.
Smoot has visited the hotel much more often than that in the two years the hotel has been under reconstruction. In fact, Smoot is suspected of coming from Blacksburg to Roanoke almost every weekend to see what progress was made the week before.
"I think it's been a Sunday afternoon ritual for Ray to come down and look at the project," said Tom Robertson, the Carilion Health System executive who headed a fund-raising campaign for the renovation. "I certainly get a lot of calls about it from him on Monday mornings."
"Ray has put his heart and soul into this," Robertson said.
Smoot is treasurer of Virginia Tech, which owns the hotel, and secretary-treasurer of the Virginia Tech Foundation, which accepted the hotel from Norfolk Southern Corp.
He was there in July 1989 when the foundation board met, appropriately, in a private dining room off the hotel's Shenandoah Room to hear Norfolk Southern's proposal to give the Hotel Roanoke to the university.
The board raised two primary doubts about it, he recalled: "One was skepticism of would we be able to finance the project and the second was would it work if we got it financed?" Smoot said. "If the hotel was not economically viable when operated by the railroad, why did we believe it would be economically viable if we reopened it?"
The foundation's board was persuaded to overlook its reservations about the project, he said, by two consultant studies that concluded new business could be drawn by coupling a first-class conference center with the hotel and marketing both aggressively.
Then the bottom dropped out of the real estate investment market, and "hotels were somewhere near the bottom of the pond," he said.
Going to lenders and raising the cost of renovation became impossible, he said, and that's why the final financing package represents a motley crew of banks, federal money, individual contributions and even loans from Carilion and the hotel's management company, Doubletree Hotels Inc.
"I have been with Tech 25 years, and this is certainly the most complex project I've worked on because it involved so many different groups and people," he said. "I've been working on it about six years." It also took a lot more of his time than he had expected. "I thought about it daily," he said.
Pushing the education angle
When Roanoke first approached Virginia Tech to seek support for a project in Roanoke, the city talked about a trade and convention center, remembers Minnis Ridenhour, Virginia Tech executive vice president.
The city wanted to know: If it built a convention center, would Tech direct some of its business to it?
"They learned that Tech wasn't involved in large conventions. We have a few, but what we're involved in were educational conferences.
"We basically left that meeting not feeling that we would do anything," Ridenhour said.
Shortly afterward, there was another meeting in which the city posed the question: "What if we find a way to make this some kind of educational mart?"
That caught Ridenhour's attention, and then the project won the enthusiasm of then-Virginia Tech president James McComas.
"One of the things we explored was the opportunity to be more involved with the city and the concept of expanded public service and expanded education," Ridenhour said.
"My involvement was looking at the kind of facilities available" for a Roanoke-Tech partnership," he said. "Then the discussion went to the need for a major hotel and then to a discussion of the Hotel Roanoke property.
Ridenhour ended up as one of three Tech representatives on the Hotel Roanoke Conference Center Commission and took part in what he says was one of the "more complex" and "exciting" projects he's worked with since he came to Tech in 1974.
It hasn't taken any more time than any other project he's had to lobby the funding for, but it may have touched him more personally.
Ridenhour came up with the concept for the Center for Organizational and Technological Advancement, the educational effort Tech proposes to operate at the Roanoke conference center.
"I take credit for that," he said. "It will be successful, OK? Ten to 15 years from now, people will look at it as a high-quality program in conferencing."
Cooking up a five-star menu
The chef's hat, apron and menu James Harvey got as a retirement gift from Roanoke City Council in 1992 recognized his role with the new Hotel Roanoke Conference Center project.
Harvey not only was chairman of the commission that directed the project, he was self-appointed overseer of its food service plans.
"I've insisted that it be a first-class, five-star restaurant and service to go along with it," he said. "The best way to kill that project is for people to go over there and have a bad experience." Harvey was appointed chairman of the Hotel Roanoke Conference Center Commission in 1992 by then-Mayor Noel Taylor.
"He thought it would be a good spot for me because I'm interested in real estate and I cherished the old hotel," Harvey said. "It's got a lot of memories for me."
Harvey is a native Roanoker who still lives in the neighborhood where he was born. To him, Hotel Roanoke was like his alma mater Jefferson High School, "quaint and friendly."
"They were places and buildings that needed to be saved," he said.
The commission consisted of three representatives from the city and three from Virginia Tech and unlike what Harvey said he expected, "that was probably the friendliest group of appointed people I've ever had to deal with. And it's a good thing, too."
Many of the things they had to do weren't easy, he said. Harvey was "shocked" at the requirements banks had for loans to the project.
"It gave me a real lesson in high finance. I'd been dealing with up to $160 million with the city and here we were dealing with a $6 million loan and it took a lot more energy."
Even the tremendous interest the community showed in the project had its downside, Harvey recalled.
"Some people thought we were spending a lot of money and they couldn't see it. One of my good friends still believes it won't pan out, but I'm going to stick by my projection -within five years of the hotel opening it's going to be expanded."
Harvey will retire from the commission as soon as the project opens and plans to spend most of the year at his second home in Pompano Beach, Fla. "It's been real fun."
While the hotel-conference center project was being built, Harvey was battling lung cancer. As the project prepares to open, he's regrown a full head of hair after going bald from chemotherapy treatments and he has a good prognosis on his health. "Now I can sit back and prop my feet up on both cases," he said. "Although you always wonder and worry about cancer."
A renovation from scratch
Anyone wanting a reservation at Brush Mountain Inn bed and breakfast this weekend was likely out of luck. The host was all tuckered out from the hospitality business.
But give him two weeks, and Mode Johnson, who owns the inn near Blacksburg, will be back cooking the full weekend breakfasts. He'll make biscuits from scratch, and try to fill the house regularly.
For more than two years, Johnson has been Virginia Tech's frontline man on the Hotel Roanoke renovation. He has run construction projects for Tech for 18 years, but this one - with a budget of $27.5 million - was the most expensive. And it was renovation, not new construction.
"There were a lot of unknowns," he said.
The assistant to the vice president of Tech has been the go-between with the developer, the contractors, the management company, the lenders and the city of Roanoke. The rest of his time, he's tried to encourage businesses churning out hotel mementos to get permission to use the trademark and fielded calls from people wanting jobs or reservations at the hotel.
"And I've become an excellent driver," he said. It's 80 miles round-trip, or about 400 miles a week, between his New River Valley home and Roanoke.
Recapturing the old mood
Atlanta designer Celeste Becker had never seen the Hotel Roanoke when she was hired to create its interiors, but she said she found its soul in old newspaper articles and pictures.
"There were so many articles and pictures of weddings and prom nights," she said. She was especially charmed by a news account of twin sisters who had a double wedding in the Crystal Ballroom.
"I've been very sensitive to the feeling the community has for" the hotel, she said.
Becker has a master's degree in interior design from the University of Georgia and runs her own firm, CWB Designs. She was invited into the Roanoke venture by Faison Associates, the developer with whom she had worked on other projects.
The intent was to create a traditional style interior with a residential feeling, she said.
To get the mood of a public area, Becker would sit in it and view old photographs taken there. She got clues on how to place the furniture in the lobby from a photograph of a man sitting in a chair in the old lobby, reading by a lamp.
A limestone fireplace has been added to the lobby, but the space generally will be as it was before the hotel closed in 1989. The registration desk is in the same place; only the old keyboxes have been removed. The elevators are the same.
Many things dictated by budget - such as room size and layout and the number of seats in the Regency Room dining area - already were decided when Becker joined the project. Doubletree Hotels Corp., which will manage the facility, handed her a 10-page document of items needed for its rooms.
"It was a matter of laying out the furniture," she said. But that's a simplification of her role, which includes assuring that furniture shipments arrive and that the construction doesn't interfere with the final plans - meaning light switches are not placed where she wants to hang a painting.
"I've moved a few light switches," she said.
Becker was also the designer for the conference center, which needed to have the same feel as the hotel because they interconnect, she said. Chandeliers from the hotel and murals found in the hotel basement have been used in the conference center to aid their compatibility. The ballroom, in fact, is in the conference center, and the old Crystal Ballroom area is an outdoor courtyard.
Certainly the greatest challenge for the designer - one that makes her smile and scrunch up her face simultaneously - was decorating the Alumni Suite with Virginia Tech's colors.
"We went heavy on the burgundy and light on the orange," she said.
Keeping track of deliveries
A coupon for cat litter peaked out from under vendor contracts on Beverly James' desk - evidence that she has a life beyond the Hotel Roanoke Conference Center Commission.
"Just let me put my head on a pillow and go to sleep," she said recently. "I don't think any of us could have imagined how much was going to be involved.
"I won't be relieved until that last chair, that last knife, spoon and fork are delivered."
Some of the china won't arrive until late May, she said.
James was director of Roanoke's library system when she was tapped to be part of the commission staff. She has been responsible for direct dealings with contractors and vendors and all the paperwork that goes along with it.
"Oh, gosh, what have I learned? I've learned that you can't assume what's happening is happening," she said.
Brokering agreements
As acting director of the Hotel Roanoke Conference Center Commission, Brian Wishneff has been responsible for most of the agreements that got the project built.
Wishneff left a job as director of economic development for the city to run the commission. The commission, made up of three city and three Tech representatives, oversaw the construction of the conference center and will continue to direct its operations.
Now, he hopes he'll get to stay around, as permanent director of the commission. He's one of eight people who submitted proposals for how the directorship should be structured, but the selection won't be made for several more weeks.
"My fate's in limbo," he said recently.
The conference center project has "consumed" him, he said, but it also has put him in the catbird seat. Already, he sees opportunities for the commission staff to serve as consultants on other projects. In January, he spoke about the hotel-conference center effort at a Council for Urban Economic Development Conference held in Scottsdale, Ariz.
"I'd like to stay a couple of years to get it over the hump," he said. "I think that it is going to do well and meet everybody's business expectations.
"I feel grand."
'Christmas' is almost here
The night before Thanksgiving, Kim Duncan worked late to catalog slides from 137 artists who wanted to sell their work to the Hotel Roanoke Conference Center.
"I've gotten a taste of having a project of my own and getting to finish it," said Duncan.
Duncan was secretary to Brian Wishneff in the city's economic development office and came to the Hotel Roanoke Conference Center Commission when he became its acting director.
The commission job didn't have a set job description, though, and she liked its variety.
One time she'd be preparing as many as 19 bid packages of 20 to 25 pages each and another day she would be supervising the installation of engraved brick in the conference center walkway.
"It's been an excellent growing experience," she said, but getting the hotel and conference center open, she fears, will be "kind of like Christmas."
"You wait and wait until it gets here, then 'whoosh,' it's gone," she said.
An interest from childhood
As a youngster, Lee Wilhelm used to charge food in the basement soda shop at Hotel Roanoke.
He had a friend whose grandparents lived in the hotel.
"The Floyd Ward Christmas Dance used to be there, too," recalls a grown-up Wilhelm, who is president of J.M. Turner & Co. construction company.
Turner was a partner with F.N. Thompson Co. of Charlotte, N.C., in the hotel renovation and construction of the conference center. It was the second project Turner has done with developer Henry Faison; the first was Valley View Mall.
The $42.9 million hotel-conference center project was built on a "very aggressive schedule" and was negotiated rather than bid, Wilhelm said. That means the contractors were brought in at the beginning, given the budget and had to work up a plan to make the project work within the budget.
Like everyone else working on the complex, Wilhelm has been surprised at the amount of interest in it.
Luncheons with friends from Woods, Rogers & Hazlegrove law firm, which has a good view of the hotel from its offices in the First Union Tower, always turn into a discussion of what's going on at the construction site, he said.
"I just tell them: 'Don't send me a bill for the time you spent watching it.'"
Architect and trouble-shooter
Architect Dave vanBlaricom expects he'll finally get to relax after Hotel Roanoke has successfully completed "its first sellout night." Then he will know that everything worked as it should.
VanBlaricom, a former Roanoke resident, never "fit" the traditional role of his profession, so he ended up trouble-shooting construction projects rather than designing them. His latest gig has been the Hotel Roanoke and The Conference Center of Roanoke project, which he has overseen for Faison & Associates development company.
His job was to monitor the project from design stages to completion to make certain it stayed within budget.
VanBlaricom, who now lives in Charlotte, also was liaison on the First Union Tower, which Faison developed. His first Roanoke Valley job was in 1972 when he came to work for the developer of Tanglewood Mall.
by CNB