Lensic hotel design ready for H-board
Four-story Spanish Baroque-style building with 70 rooms planned on parking lot site
Four-story building with 70 rooms planned.
Greer Enterprises has plans to build a four-story, 70-room hotel with Spanish Baroque-style features next to its Lensic Performing Arts Center on what is now a parking lot at the corner of San Francisco and Sandoval streets.
The 200 Block Hotel, as the project is called, must first gain approval from the Santa Fe Planning Commission and the city’s Historic Districts Review Board. Joseph Karnes, an attorney at Sommer, Karnes & Associates who represents Greer Enterprises, said he expects to apply for hearings on the project before both panels by the end of the year. He estimated the hotel’s construction to cost $25 million. This isn’t the first time Greer has proposed a hotel at the site, which has served as a 46-space parking lot since 1972, when a two-story commercial building was demolished there at the tail end of a larger urban renewal effort that led to the razing of dozens of downtown buildings beginnings in 1968.
Greer made a first stab at building a hotel on the property in 1999, Karnes said, but a severe drought halted those plans.
Then the 2008 economic turmoil squelched plans approved in 2007 for a four-story, mixed-use building with retail space and 12 condominiums called The Villas at the Lensic. Another hotel plan stalled in 2017 over a parking garage quandary: The L-shaped, quarter-acre site was too small to build ramps down to the garage.
The current plans solve the issue by including vehicle elevators rather than ramps.
Architect Jeff Seres of Seres Architecture said the four-story building would have the appearance of a two-story structure from the street level because the third and fourth floors would be set back.
A model of the hotel and surrounding buildings was presented Tuesday at an Early Neighborhood Notification meeting, which precedes submission of development plans to the city Land Use Department.
Greer Enterprises owns the entire block bounded by San Francisco and Sandoval streets, Palace Avenue and Burro Alley. The Greer family has owned the block for about a century. They built the Spanish-Moorish-style Lensic theater in 1930, which was restored and renovated in 1999 and 2001.
Seres noted the Spanish Baroque features on the 200 Block Hotel plans, such as an arched colonnade that will follow the curve of Sandoval Street as it transitions into Palace Avenue.
“The arches along the outside of the ground floor portals and the limestone or precast concrete cornice copings around the arches and above at the parapets exemplify the Spanish Baroque style,” Seres said.
The hotel’s main entrance will be on Sandoval Street, where guests would hand their vehicles over to a valet to be parked in the two-level, 116-space underground garage. Valets would park and retrieve cars via two vehicle elevators on Palace Avenue.