New downtown hotels and expansions of existing

New downtown hotels and expansions of existing hotels are being talked about in Providence, RI, where CNU’s 14th annual conference will be held June 1-4, 2006. On narrow Westminster Street, Providence developer and antiques connoisseur Stanley Weiss this year opened the Hotel Providence, an 80-room boutique hotel formed by joining two old buildings. A few blocks away, the Procaccianti Group plans to convert the downtown Holiday Inn to a high-end Hilton and add 40 rooms, along with a 17,000 sq. ft. fitness center, shops, and restaurants oriented to pedestrian traffic, according to a Sept. 4 report in The New York Times. Other projects being planned or considered, including conversion of a Masonic temple into a 274-room Renaissance hotel, could bring the total number of new hotel rooms to 850. The projects come in the wake of a downtown master plan produced in a March 2004 charrette by Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. (see April 2004 New Urban News).