Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, April 6, 1995 TAG: 9504070005
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KIMBERLY N. MARTIN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
When the hotel closed in 1989, almost everything was ticketed and sold - even the doors.
Yet the records of who got what are sketchy at best, said Frank Long, vice president of National Contents Liquidators, which is the company that then-hotel owner Norfolk Southern Corp. contracted in 1989 to handle the sale.
"There were over 6,000 invoices written up. We had 14 clerks writing invoices, and they weren't required to get a name," Long said. Neither Long nor the railroad has disclosed how much he paid Norfolk Southern for the hotel's innards or how much he grossed on the 17-day sale.
What he does remember is that an Atlanta laundry dealer got all the laundry equipment and an Ohio businessman got the Steinway grand piano.
But "90 percent" of the hotel is right here in the Roanoke Valley, he said.
Dec. 4, 1989, is a day Mona Black said she will never forget. It was a cold morning around 6 when Black and her team arrived at the estate-style sale. Their mission was to buy Hotel Roanoke furnishings for Center in the Square.
Everyone had a job, and hers was the dubious task of securing tables. No sooner would Black roll one of the Regency Room's old round tables into a stack she was holding, than they would disappear.
"I've never seen so many people grabbing so much stuff," Black said of the sale.
A few thousand dollars and a couple of van loads later, the team had equipped the Cartledge Connection, a meeting area in Center in the Square named for George Cartledge, long-time patron of the cultural center.
"We weren't savage in our taking or greedy,'' Black said. ``We took only what was of use to us.''
A final inventory put that at 35 to 40 cups and saucers, as much silverware as they could hunt down, pitchers, silver punch bowls, carts, trash cans, five tables and a slew of chairs. They even bought an old metal coat rack.
But the 60 place settings of dogwood china was the coup of the trip.
"It's a treasure,'' said Black, director of group development for Mill Mountain Theatre, which is housed in Center in the Square. ``It's handled very carefully. It's not available for everyday use. It's something we feel very fortunate to have."
Dick Dunford wasn't interested in the famous china pattern. Instead, he was ferreting through the piles of goods in search of a souvenir that no one else would have. He eventually selected the oil portrait of former Miss America and Southwest Virginia native Kylene Barker.
"Everyone was getting dishes, but I wanted something there was only one of," Dunford said. "When I bought it I thought I'd like to see it put back in there if [the hotel] ever reopened ... It belongs there."
Time hasn't squelched that desire. He said he's making plans to have the $225 painting taken down from his study wall and rehung in the hotel.
The long lines at the sale kept Eddie Higginbotham away for days. He went in once briefly and eyed a grand piano with longing, but its $6,700 price tag scared him off.
On the 14th day of the sale, Higginbotham went back, hoping to take home something to remind him of the place where he'd attended banquets while growing up. It was a cold, snowy December afternoon when he strolled through hotel. The walls were bare, the floors stripped of most of their carpeting.
"It was basically empty," Higginbotham said.
Only two pianos remained - an old studio piano with a bum front leg and a grand piano, which he believes had been in the Regency Room. When he spotted the instrument he'd earlier been eyeing, Higginbotham was sure it had been sold.
"It didn't have the cover on it, so I assumed it had been sold,'' he said. ``But when I asked them about it, they said no, and they were accepting bids on it.''
Although the Roanoke County resident left that day with only a couple of bar glasses, a week later the grand piano was standing in his den.
Higginbotham declined to say how much he paid for the piano, which wears a few scars along its black lacquer finish. However, he did say it was less than the original $6,700 ticket.
"When I bought it everybody knew where it came from. It was like getting your first sports car or Rolls Royce. I realize it's not a Rolls Royce, but to me it is," he said. "Most people seem to be impressed when I tell them it's from the hotel, and if they're not, I am."
John Williams, owner of the downtown Roanoke restaurant Billy's Ritz, not only stocked his restaurant with kitchen supplies from the sale, but walked away with one of the hotel's most memorable pieces: the white table with griffin supports that once stood center stage in the Oval Room. Now, topped by a plant - just as it was in the Oval Room - the table sits in a seldom-occupied section of the restaurant.
"We saw it there and thought it was something that we could use," Williams said.
The planters that once divided the hotel's lobby from its bar are also in Billy's Ritz, as are the mirrors with gold awnings that once hung in the hotel's Peacock Alley.
But those mirrors are mere Barbie-sized replicas compared to the 8-foot tall, almost century-old mirror that now decorates Dakota's Barbecue & Grill in Christiansburg and is believed by some to be from the hotel.
"A lot of people thought that it came from the hotel,'' said Lillie Journiette, the niece-in-law of the woman who bought the mirror around 1950. ``It looked like something that would be in the hotel, but I don't know.''
The family sold the mirror to John McDaniel, who displayed it at his business, Olde Salem Stained Glass and Antiques. Customers told McDaniel they remembered the mirror from the hotel foyer.
"I had 500 different people come in here, recommending that I call [the hotel], and try to get them to take it back," McDaniel said.
The hotel initially passed on the mammoth gold mirror because funds were unavailable. By the time the hotel found the money and the space, McDaniel had sold the mirror to Dakota's, said Celeste Becker, the hotel's interior designer.
There were some pieces that Virginia Tech, the owner of the hotel, never let get away.
The chandeliers and wood paneling were never put on the market. Instead they were stashed away inside the hotel.
A couple of old prints also were kept within the hotel's reach. Nancy Connelly, director of the Roanoke Valley Historical Society and Museum, saw to that.
She said portraits of George Washington and Robert E. Lee that hung in the downtown museum for the last five years are "heading home" to the hotel.
"They aren't fine art. They're hotel art," Connelly said. "The art museum didn't want them, but they had the foresight of their historical significance, so they gave them to us."
An old console table also has been returned to the hotel, and a set of each of the three different old dogwood china patterns will be on display in a Regency Room breakfront cabinet.
by CNB