The city of Albany has finally made public its plan for the old St. Francis hotel building downtown. The plan is to buy the building from the printing company that owns it, and sell it to Marc Manley, who with his wife Anni owns and restored the Flinn Block farther east on First Avenue.
The former St. Francis Hotel, a downtown landmark for more than a century, was mentioned twice at last week’s meeting of the Albany Revitalization Agency. That’s the city council when it acts as the agency governing CARA, the Central Albany Revitalization Area.
Albany’s urban renewal agency will try to buy a downtown property. They don’t want the public to know which one, but it sounds like the building and parking lot of the former Wells Fargo branch on First Avenue.
Architecturally speaking, downtown Albany would be a more exciting place if there was a way to carry out any of several redevelopment designs worked up by students at the University of Oregon.
What are the chances of a successful hotel being developed in downtown Albany? Conventional wisdom says zero to none. But maybe the conventional wisdom is wrong. And come winter, business students at the University of Oregon will try to answer the question in a systematic way.
The former St. Francis Hotel in downtown Albany was 101 years old this year. The question now is whether there’s a chance of restoring the vacant upper floors of this four-story landmark — and the adjacent Rhodes block built in 1907 — as apartments or partly as a so-called “boutique hotel.” A team of architects […]
St. Francis project cost stuns CARA board
Architect Bill Ryals’ concept of the restored St. Francis Hotel with a roof-top restaurant and diagonal parking on Ferry Street.Renovating the former St. Francis Hotel in downtown Albany would cost $10-11 million, and when it’s done it would be worth $4-5 million. This means that for the project to go ahead, the CARA urban renewal […]
Tags: CARA, downown Albany, St. Francis, St. Francis-Rhodes, urban renewal