BY WILL JONES
TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER
Thursday, April 27, 2006


The knock on Richmond was two-fold when planners started marketing the expanded convention center.




The conditions of buildings along Broad Street and the lack of hotel rooms near the convention center were given about equally as reasons groups booked meetings elsewhere from 1999 to 2002, according to the Richmond Metropolitan Convention & Visitors Bureau.
City leaders yesterday lauded a $95 million development that will help on both fronts.
A renovation of the iconic Miller & Rhoads building into a Hilton Hotel and condominiums is under way after five years of planning and a few setbacks. The project, previously estimated at $80 million, is expected to be finished by summer 2008.
"As soon as they push the dirt, we can start selling that, and we will start selling that," said Jack Berry, president and chief executive officer of the convention bureau.
Berry said physical improvements along Broad have had such a dramatic effect in recent years that the lack of hotel rooms nearby is now the main obstacle in courting conventions. "Broad Street, it's never a reason" cited by groups, he said.
The Hilton Hotel and condo project is another sign that downtown's revitalization is real, said William E. Harrell, the city's chief administrative officer.
"The core has had such disinvestment for decades -- not years, decades," Harrell said. "This represents a turnaround of that."
Mayor L. Douglas Wilder recalled going to the department stores along Broad Street as a child and said the grandeur is being recaptured.
"People are not going to be just passing through," Wilder added. "They're going to be living in downtown Richmond."
City officials announced in 2001 that they were working with ECI Investment Advisors of Chicago to convert the empty Miller & Rhoads building into a hotel.
Michael Laing, executive vice president with ECI, said he never doubted the hotel would happen. However, he said, ECI "took a pretty good punch in the stomach" in 2004 when it had trouble getting local financing for a 329-room hotel.
ECI enlisted HRI Properties of New Orleans and Prudential Financial as partners and changed the plan to include 250 hotel rooms and 150 condos.
"That pulled it all together," he said.
The hotel and condos will have separate entrances but will work together, said Hal Fairbanks, project manager for HRI Properties. For example, residents will have access to the hotel's room service and health-club facilities.
"Residential is the chicken and the egg of downtown revitalization," Fairbanks said, borrowing a quote from HRI Properties founder Pres Kabacoff.
With the hotel under way, it's one block down, another to go for Broad.
Monday is the deadline for a committee to submit a draft report to Wilder on what should be done with the stalled arts center that has been planned for one block east of Miller & Rhoads.
Wilder expects the report to be finished by Monday but said it might not be submitted and made public until the following week.
"I'm excited about what I hear might be in the report," he said.

Contact staff writer Will Jones at wjones@timesdispatch.com or (804) 649-6911.
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