Brenda Thompson’s mother worked at Hotel Roanoke for 38 years. Her grandmother worked there for 40 years. But Thompson could not get a job there — because Hotel Roanoke was not open.
For five long years in the early 1990s, the Roanoke landmark was shuttered while plans for its renovation slowly came together. Then, in February 1995, Thompson saw the news she had been waiting for. The hotel was hiring.
“I looked in the paper and there it was,” Thompson said. “It said to go down to the National Guard Armory and interview for a job. I went and they hired me on the spot.”
On April 3, 1995, the freshly remodeled Hotel Roanoke Conference Center reopened for business. The opening was the culmination of an expensive, complex project that required the efforts and money of Roanoke city officials, Virginia Tech, Norfolk Southern and Doubletree Hotels, not to mention thousands of regular folks and business leaders who contributed more than $5 million in a lightning-fast, last-ditch campaign.
Twenty years after its reopening, the 133-year-old Tudor-style hotel is still the grand dame of Roanoke’s downtown skyline, the scene of countless weddings, honeymoons, family vacations and Easter dinners. Since 1995, the hotel’s conference center has brought thousands of people to Roanoke for business and pleasure.
“Hotel Roanoke is a great success story,” said John Dooley, Chief Executive Officer of the Virginia Tech Foundation, which has owned the hotel since 1989.
The hotel has contributed millions of dollars to the local economy and downtown Roanoke, an impact that will be tallied in a soon-to-be released study. The hotel garners excellent reviews from travelers and writers — just two weeks ago, travel writer Steve Winston ranked Hotel Roanoke at number six in his column “My Top 10 Hotels in America,” ahead of the Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles and one spot behind The Plaza in Manhattan.
“Called ‘The Grand Old Lady,’ this hotel is unlike any other on this list,” wrote Winston, a Florida-based writer who has included Roanoke on several of his “best of” lists.”
“It’s a place of refined (but not stuffy) Southern gentility, where the waiters still wear white gloves and where people still say ‘Sir’ and ‘Ma’am.’ And I love it for that reason.”
Hotel Roanoke is a registered National Historical Landmark and was recently inducted into the Historic Hotels of America program.
To locals, however, Hotel Roanoke is more than just dollar signs and a swanky tourist destination. The hotel is part of the city’s communal family. People of different races, creeds and bank accounts are drawn there, whether to stay in a fancy suite, quaff a brew at the Pine Room Pub or simply wander its corridors at Christmas to admire the many decorated trees.
And for someone like Thompson, whose mother, Maxine Thompson, was a housekeeping supervisor and whose grandmother, Mammie Lavender, was a housekeeper, the hotel gives her the chance to be part of a real family legacy. She has been a housekeeper at the hotel since the doors reopened in 1995, one of about a dozen current employees who have been there that long.
“I helped ’em open up,” she said, “and I’m still here.”
Hotel Roanoke is still there, too. But reopening the “Grand Old Lady” wasn’t easy.
‘A difficult project’
Imagine this Roanoke skyline as you arrive along Interstate 581: the steeples of St. Andrew’s, the Wells Fargo Tower, the Dr Pepper and HC Coffee neon signs … and a Walmart.
Roanoke mayor David Bowers remembers a closed-door meeting he attended in 1991 to talk about the hotel, which had closed in late 1989 and sat barren as renovation plans languished. The meeting consisted of a few city leaders, Virginia Tech officials and folks from Norfolk Southern. The railroad had given the hotel to Tech’s foundation with the idea that it would be completely remodeled, but two years later, nothing had happened.
“Somebody said ‘If we don’t do something about Hotel Roanoke, they’re going to tear it down and it would be a great spot for a Walmart store’,” said Bowers, who was a city council member then and would become mayor the next year.
The threat of building a Walmart on the hotel site was surely a dubious, empty threat, but the intent was clear — to scare the city and university honchos into getting to work to bring Hotel Roanoke back to life. If something didn’t happen soon, the doors might never reopen.
The hotel had been closed since Nov. 30, 1989, a few months after Norfolk Southern — which built the hotel in 1882, the same year Roanoke was born, and ran it for the next 107 years — gave the hotel to Tech.
Spurred into action, Roanoke and Tech officials began formalizing plans to renovate the hotel and build a taxpayer-financed conference center. Many people worked on the project, including former city manager Bob Herbert, retired Virginia Tech Foundation CEO Ray Smoot, the late Mayor Noel Taylor, retired Carilion Health System (now Carilion Clinic) boss Tom Robertson, developer Henry Faison (who developed Valley View Mall and the current Wells Fargo Tower, then called the Dominion Tower), former economic development director Brian Wishneff and dozens of others.
Smoot has called the Hotel Roanoke project one of the most complicated he worked on during his four decades at Tech.
“The project had several constituencies that had to come together to make it work,” Smoot said. “Plus, the bottom dropped out of the hotel market in the early ’90s and it was difficult to get financing. We had five different financial institutions take a piece if the debt. It was a very difficult project.”
The price tag was $42 million. The city expected to spend up to $20 million on the conference center alone.
There were other hurdles. Just when renovations were set to begin, the owners of other Roanoke hotels hired consultants who cast doubt on the viability of the project and said the city’s investment could force the closing of other hotels.
“You’re creating an economic nightmare,” one consultant told The Roanoke Times in 1992, adding that the hotel and conference center project “won’t work.”
But the public bought into the renovation from the beginning. The project received a huge lift when a fundraising campaign called Renew Roanoke raised $5 million in a six-week blitz between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day in late 1992. Carilion gave $2 million. So did Norfolk Southern. Local folks crammed Renew Roanoke’s downtown office to give cash and write checks. Roanokers wanted their hotel back.
Construction started in 1993 and continued throughout the next year. Despite some political haggling over funding from the state’s budget, the money was there to finish the project. Doubletree Hotels was selected to manage the hotel and conference center. Hotel Roanoke would reopen.
Significant impact
Hotel Roanoke was Gary Walton’s 13th hotel, and Roanoke was the 11th city he had worked in as a hotel manager. When Doubletree transferred him from a hotel in Chapel Hill, North Carolina to Roanoke in 1994, he figured he would guide Hotel Roanoke through its grand reopening, then move on to the next job and city.
Twenty years later, Walton is still general manager of the Hotel Roanoke Conference Center.
“There were opportunities over the years when the company would ask me if I wanted to do something elsewhere, and I didn’t want to go anywhere else,” he said. “I was in a great community with a great hotel and a great team. My family grew up here. We never wanted to leave.”
Under Walton’s leadership, the 331-room Hotel Roanoke has won industry awards and has steadily weathered tough economic times, especially during the recession that began in 2007. Walton said the hotel’s occupancy rate has been at all-time highs the past two years. In 2012, the hotel averaged 82 percent occupancy, with more than 100,000 guest rooms occupied during the year, according to Public Relations and Advertising Manager Michael Quonce.
The hotel and conference center’s management and ownership are a bit complicated. The hotel is owned by the Virginia Tech Foundation and managed by Doubletree. The conference center is owned by a commission that includes representatives from Roanoke and Tech. Revenue from the hotel goes to Tech, which pays Doubletree a management fee, then keeps any money left over for programs supported by the foundation.
The conference center commission plows its revenues back into the conference center.
Dooley, the foundation’s CEO, said that Tech will release an economic impact report next month that will show Hotel Roanoke’s contribution to the regional tourism economy.
“It’s fair to say that the impact of the hotel on the region is significant,” said Dooley, who has seen a draft of the report. “It’s impressive.”
Catherine Fox, Director of Public Relations and Tourism for the Roanoke Valley Convention Visitors Bureau, found data from the Virginia Tourism Corporation that appears to show a financial windfall from the hotel’s reopening.
According to the VTC, travel spending in Roanoke increased from $175 million in 1994, when the hotel was still closed, to $198 million in 1995, the year it opened. The $23 million increase was more than double the growth of the previous year, from 1993 to 1994.
Now, 20 years later, travel spending in Roanoke has reached nearly $385 million annually. Hotel Roanoke is not responsible for all of the increases over the years, but Fox said the hotel “is a key part of it.”
Dooley said that the success of the Hotel Roanoke project paved the way for other major collaborations between Roanoke and Virginia Tech, including the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine and Research and the Roanoke Higher Education Center.
What’s old is new
In many ways, it’s hard to remember that the hotel was closed for five and a half years. In 1989, Hotel Roanoke showed its age. Rooms were too small for modern travelers who hauled much more luggage in their minivans than the guests who arrived by train a century earlier. The televisions were old, the décor was out of style and the furnishings and fixtures needed upgrades.
Now, the hotel still seems old — but in a good way. The lobby evinces an “Old Virginny” feel with its large portraits of George Washington and Robert E. Lee and its murals of antebellum garden parties and Colonial-era dances.
Hanging in a hallway are the photographs of three Miss Virginias who went on to become Miss Americas: Caressa Cameron, Nicole Johnson and, of course, former Hokie Kylene Barker, the Miss America from Carroll County.
The menu in the Regency Room still includes spoonbread and peanut soup, the latter concoction created by Chef Fred Brown in 1940.
The corridors are filled with memories. Walton, the manager, remembers people who essentially lived in the hotel for years while they worked in Roanoke but kept their homes in other cities. Bowers remembers as a young Democrat watching bespectacled Henry Howell campaigning to become a nominee for governor in his pajamas by pounding on guest-room doors at midnight during a convention and hollering, ”It’s Henry Howell! It’s time to wake up Virginia!” (He lost the nomination.)
And it’s a place where Brenda Thompson, who became the third generation of her family to work at Hotel Roanoke, can remember her mother, who cleaned many of these rooms 30 years ago. Thompson’s mother died before the hotel reopened.
“She loved it here,” said Thompson, stopping briefly as she made a bed, one of 16 she’d do that day. “I wish she could have seen it now.”
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