Lessons from the past

• Meier & Frank makeover traces path taken by 5th Avenue Suites

By Jeanie Senior

The Portland Tribune, Jun 7, 2005, Updated Oct 30, 2009

In fall 2007,at the conclusion of a massive remodeling job set to begin this September,Meier & Frank Co.’s downtown flagship will emerge with a Marriott Renaissance Hotel on the top nine floors and an updated department store on the first five floors.

But the $137.3 million project, aimed at keeping a viable retailer in the heart of Portland’s shopping core, won’t be a simple transformation. For one thing, the department store on Southwest Morrison Street will remain open during the remodeling. And as part of the work, the 665,000-square-foot building, which occupies an entire city block, will get a seismic upgrade for earthquake safety.

Demolition of the top nine floors is scheduled to start in September; it will take a break during the holiday shopping season, with reconstruction beginning next February.

Built in earlier days when flagship department stores were full-service institutions that sold everything from fabric to toys, millinery to groceries, the mammoth buildings can pose a unique redevelopment challenge.

There’s an example of retail-to-hotel use just north across Southwest Washington Street from Meier & Frank, where the 221-room boutique hotel 5th Avenue Suites now occupies the 10-story building that originally housed the Lipman Wolfe Department Store.

The hotel opened in 1996, a few years after Lipman’s successor, Frederick & Nelson, went bankrupt and closed.

The extensive renovation of the former department store took the building down to bare walls and floors, said David Sussman, vice president of hotel development and design for Kimpton Hotel & Restaurant Group LLC, which owns 5th Avenue Suites.

“One of the most vivid memories for me about that job was watching workers with torches cutting out the old escalators,” Sussman said. “We didn’t need escalators in the hotel as they did in the department store.”

Getting rid of the old escalators was an expensive part of the demolition, he said.

Because the layout of a department store is considerably different than that of a hotel, converting a large multifloor store to hotel use can carry its own set of complications.

In the case of the Lipman building, Sussman said, “there were windows around three sides, with a huge center core, which isn’t very useful for a hotel; you can’t put people into spaces without windows.”

As a result, the hotel “became a building with a lot of suites Ñ extra-long rooms with a living room area that opened into a bedroom area,” he said.

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