Are hotels the new condos? As our story The Hotel Boom notes, hotel construction has become the hot development topic this year, perhaps even edging out condos. Some 20 years after several old lodgings in downtown Minneapolis were felled like elderly bison (remember the Curtis, Leamington, Sheraton-Ritz, Andrews, and Pick-Nicollet?), new hotel projects are proposed or under way, including some in the Uptown area (say what?).
Of this new breed, we like Connecticut-based HEI Hospitality’s “hotelification” of the former Farmers & Mechanics Bank on South Sixth Street in Minneapolis, which will become a Westin. The exterior is appealing enough, with the buff bas-reliefs of Farmer and Mechanic on either side of the main entrance. (The bank was built in the heyday of the old Farmer-Labor Party.) But it’s the handsome interior that makes this structure, with its nickel-plated vault doors and Moderne chandeliers. HEI plans to keep most of these elements in place.
This isn’t the big convention hotel that many in the local business community have long hoped for. But it will help fill the distinctive niche that opened up when the riverfront Whitney Hotel closed a few years back.
