Big Plans Unveiled for Downtown's Historic Roosevelt Hotel

A historic San Angelo hotel will be brought back to life downtown next year, as design and construction plans are set into motion at the old Roosevelt Hotel.

The building has been a mainstay in San Angelo history since its construction in 1929, surviving the Great Depression, multiple ownerships and plans for demolition staved off by Downtown San Angelo, Inc. circa 2010.

At the height of its glory, the Roosevelt, then called the Rainbow Hotel, featured nine rooms, each with a bath, a coffee shop, and new Simmons Furniture purchased at the end of the depression. Rooms back in 1934 ran $1 a night and up to $2 with a bath.

Over the years, the hotel was bought and sold, seeing dark days of closure, re-openings and redecoration. The last known use of the space ended around 1994, when it closed as a boarding house.

In December last year, President and CEO of Capital City Hospitality Group Hitesh Patel came to San Angelo to view a building located next to the Cactus, when members of the city’s economic development corporation suggested he view the space at the corner of College and Chadbourne streets. Immediately, Patel said, he knew this would be the location he’d like to leave a mark on.

“What our plan is to bring the Roosevelt Hotel to its glamorous days that it had,” Patel said at a press conference held at Miss Hattie’s Tuesday. “We want to just refurb it and make it into a beautiful hotel.”

Patel hopes to maintain much of the historical integrity of the space in his design, focusing more on restoration than on morphing the space into something it's not, he said. His restoration ambitions are a new venture for him and his team, who have previously worked only on ground-up constructions. In order to execute the plan, the group has partnered with Choice Hotels, whose Ascend Collection features boutique-style hospitality properties.

Since the initial nine rooms were constructed in the late ‘20s, another 90 or so have been added, bringing the total to the approximately 100 rooms that comprise the hotel today. Patel says he will reduce that number by half so that each of the rooms offers adequate space. A rooftop bar and lounge is also planned for the structure, where appetizers and breakfast will be served in addition to drinks.

“The décor of the building, we want to keep it San Angelo,” Patel said. “We want to keep the historic feel of the building and we want to just make it a beautiful hotel where the city and the residents can be proud to have a hotel of that stature in their city.”

Coming from Austin, Patel is seeking community input to aid in the interior design, which he estimates will take approximately two months to lay out once the information has been gathered.

“One of the things that we’re going to be asking for is local residents who have stayed here in the past to start sending pictures to Del (Velazquez of Downtown San Angelo, Inc.), so that way we can mirror what it used to look like and bring that life back to the hotel,” he said.

The photos and memories, as well as those from the city’s collection and from the West Texas Collection, will be used as aids for the interior design.

Del Velasquez was in attendance on Tuesday and explained a bit about how his organization came into possession of the hotel around 2010. Since then, he said, they’ve just been waiting for the right person to come in and restore the building.

“This one came because it was going to be demolished. We stepped in and said, ‘No, don’t demolish it. Give it to us’, and they donated it to us,” Velasquez explained. “Mrs. Patel called me at the end of December…and we shared with her that our goal and mission was to make sure that we restored that building and make it come back alive.”

After taking over the building roughly four years ago, Downtown San Angelo, Inc. took advantage of its non-profit status to solicit aid in cleaning out the space and preparing it for sale. Habitat for Humanity, Republic Services, the city Economic Development team and trustees from the county jail aided in the clean up and abatement process, which Velasquez said took about a year.  

In line with the city’s strong push to revitalize downtown, Patel said he hopes his hotel will attract more business to the area.

Asked what attracted him to the heart of the city, Patel said, “I think it’s the proximity to city hall and the arts…then the hospital. That’s big for us. That’s like walking distance to everything. Also on that part of the downtown what I’d like to see is more retail and restaurant business coming in, and I think with a hotel coming in there, I think it’s going to create a buzz where people will want to open up a business or something and cause more development for the city.”

On Tuesday, Patel officially closed on the building. Having started drafting plans in March, tentative designs and floorplans were completed in May, which depict some 48 spacious rooms on 23,706 square feet. With a hopeful groundbreaking February of next year, Patel hopes to have the Roosevelt up and running by August or September 2015.

“The aesthetics of having a building come back to life is just super exciting,” Velasquez said. “This is a dream come true for us. It’s a phenomenal step for our organization to be the catalyst that made this happen. It’s humongous for us.”