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Letter to the editor

Historic hotel will reawaken as Marriott

By SHARON L. BOND
Published May 4, 2005

ST. PETERSBURG - After years in limbo, the historic Pennsylvania Hotel is slated to become a Marriott Courtyard hotel, complete with a new additional seven-story building.

The 128-room Marriott will have a restaurant, meeting room, indoor pool, spa, exercise room and lounge, and is supposed to open next April.

The site will also include a skinny lot next to the hotel that had been pegged to become the Fourth Street Lofts by developer Grady Pridgen. Pridgen said Tuesday he decided to sell the land to the Marriott developers for parking.

The construction cost for the hotel project is $6.6-million, according to city records.

The seven-story building at 300 Fourth St. N will be renovated, keeping as many of its Art Deco design details as possible, said Frank Zorc, vice president of development with WB Development Services of Orlando. It will have 54 rooms.

The second building, which will have 74 rooms, will not be a copy of the Pennsylvania, Zorc said.

"It will be like a great-granddaughter of the existing building," he said. "It will look like something that will be happy next to it ... but not an attempt to copy it."

The Pennsylvania opened in 1925 and was St. Petersburg's last seasonal hotel, occupied by residents from the Northwho came every year to stay during the winter. The hotel stayed open until 2000.

WB, along with Pinnacle Hotel Management in Fort Lauderdale, former owner David Moore of St. Petersburg and other partners are restoring the hotel. Moore now works for WB, Zorc said. WB is a subsidiary of Welbro Building Corp., and Pinnacle is a subsidiary of Marriott.

"We will build and own and manage the Marriott," said Ron Franklin, president of Pinnacle. "This will be our 18th hotel. We are very excited about it."

He said the group paid about $3-million for the hotel. Moore bought it in 1999 from the Bond family, which had owned it since 1937. He paid about $1.35-million for it.

Moore originally planned to refurbish the Pennsylvania as a boutique or specialty hotel. But after the Sept. 11 attacks, financing was impossible to get, he said. In 2002 he announced he was building condominiums in the hotel and planned to tear down the attached buildings. On their spot, he planned another condo building.

Efforts to reach Moore were unsuccessful.

Room prices are not yet set, but Franklin said they would average $120 per night, with rates higher in the season and lower in the summer.

Pridgen, who sold the skinny lot to Welbro, owns the church and rectory in the 200 block of Fourth, next door to the hotel. Efforts to turn the church into a restaurant or banquet facility should be easier with the arrival of the Marriott and another condominium tower planned for the Bond Hotel site nearby, he said.

[Last modified May 4, 2005, 00:57:19]