There’s a small hotel, with a wishing well. . . . So goes the old Broadway tune, and in fact there’s more than one small hotel coming to downtown Chicago.
They may not have wishing wells, but they have a powerful well-wisher in the person of Bill Kimpton, who is going to be opening two of them here.
Kimpton, chairman of the San Francisco-based Kimpton Hotel & Restaurant Group Inc., was in town this week for the opening of another hotel, the new Hotel Allegro Chicago born from the shell of the former Bismarck Hotel at 171 W. Randolph St.
While not exactly small at 483 rooms, Kimpton said the Allegro represents an attempt to capture the “feel” of a small hotel.
What does that mean? “Friendly, with coziness and warmth,” said Kimpton, 62, who spent part of his childhood in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood and graduated from Northwestern University.
Kimpton started his business of developing and running small hotels in 1980 after traveling the globe as an investment banker and getting sick of staying in conventional, large hotels.
“They were so lonely, impersonal, such huge monsters,” Kimpton said. After six months, he declared, a nice person working at the front desk of a typical hotel of 1,000 or so rooms wouldn’t be able to be nice anymore. Such hotels “create a totally impersonal relationship,” he declared.
Kimpton has always had a thing for hotels, but his early experiences weren’t propitious. He was more or less fired from his first job as a desk clerk at the age of 18, and later failed to get into Cornell University’s famed hotel school, he said.
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But that was probably lucky, added the iconoclastic Kimpton, who was dressed for his Chicago visit in true San Francisco fashion with khakis, bright Shetland sweater and baseball cap.
If he had taken the predictable route to hotel industry advancement, “I’d probably be the drunken manager of a hotel in Phoenix,” he said.
His idea is that travelers are tired and a little bit frightened and need a friendly, preferably familiar face. “If you can help with that and make them feel safer, they will come back,” he said.
With the Allegro, Kimpton’s chain numbers 23 hotels, including 14 in downtown San Francisco. One of the new Loop inns will be a 180-room hotel called the Hotel Monaco Chicago at the old Oxford House at Wabash Avenue and Wacker Drive, which is already being redeveloped. The other is a 100-room hotel in the historic Reliance Building at State and Washington Streets.
“These renovations bring back to life the grand old downtown buildings. I love that. It’s fun,” said Kimpton.
It’ll be a gas: Another classic Loop building that is likely to get the small hotel treatment is the elegant Peoples Gas Building at 122 S. Michigan.
Peoples Gas moved out three years ago after being in the 21-story structure since it was built in 1910 from plans by Daniel Burnham, and the 512,000-square-foot building has been hard pressed for tenants since then, especially on the lower floors.
Chicago’s Prime Group Realty Trust recently purchased the building, and Prime Chairman Michael Reschke said he plans to convert the lower seven floors of the building to a 225-suite hotel.
With its street front of polished granite columns and other handsome architectural details the hotel will have special appeal to visitors lured by the Art Institute across the street, Reschke said.
“It would be a seven-day hotel with fantastic Friday and Saturday business attracting tourist
clientele,” said Reschke.
The conversion will represent one more step in the changing character of South Michigan Avenue, Reschke noted. “It’s getting a much more residential than corporate headquarters feel,” he said.
The Prime chairman added that he was talking with several possible operators–among them, none other than Kimpton, of course.
Eyes of the beholder: Kimpton noted that the rehab of dowager queen buildings into comely hotels–including an aged department store in downtown Portland, Ore., that was near collapse–was a case of making a silk purse of a sow’s ear.
Another recent sow’s ear achievement award, press release division, should go to a spokesman for the Vanguard Lofts, a residential conversion by Rezmar Development of an industrial building at 1250 W. Van Buren St.
One view for residents “looks across the glittering lights of the ever-moving Eisenhower Expressway,” the spokesman is quoted as saying.
Well, it’s not quite the same as the glittering lights of Paris cafes or the yachts in the harbor at Monaco, but we get the idea.
As for “ever-moving,” all that can be said is, “Flow gently, sweet Eisenhower.”