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Developers eye historic mill for hotel

The city of Hendersonville is getting strong nibbles in its recruitment of hotel developer downtown and a key part of the quest will take place next month.

The City Council will host a public meeting during which residents will get a look at possible hotel plans, including a scale model of an 80- to 100-room multistory hotel on the old Grey Hosiery Mill property on Grove Street at Fourth Avenue.
Three council members said in interviews that they’re enthusiastic about that prospect for a several reasons. A hotel with conference space could connect downtown with Seventh Avenue, which has been a goal of the council. It would be alongside the Fourth Avenue bikeway and potentially be a stop on a greenway connector that included the Ecusta Trail. And it would at long last result in development of the city-owned Grey Hosiery Mill, a goal the City Council has been pursuing for eight years.
The council has set a special meeting to present the hotel recruitment project for 6 p.m. Oct. 18 at the City Operations Center on Williams Street. Last October the city hired by a consulting group affiliated with the UNC School of Government to conduct a study to evaluate the need for a hotel and potentially connect the city with a private developer. Council members said at the time that the city-owned Dogwood lot on Church Street between Fourth and Fifth Avenues could be a potential site, though the study was not limited to that site.
“We asked them to study any location for a 100-bed hotel and primarily to study the advantages and disadvantages of the Dogwood lot and the old mill,” Mayor pro tem Steve Caraker said. “It turns out the mill has many more advantages to develop that particular entity.”
Caraker and Councilman Ron Stephens, veterans of a bruising zoning war over high-rise development downtown, argued for a scale model of a hotel on the mill property.
“You can listen to people all day long and not grasp what it would look like,” Caraker said. “This thing has been in and out of the news for eight years. The School of Government has identified the mill site as a very good location for a hotel.”


Plan would use old mill


One developer the city has been negotiating with has extensive experience in adaptive reuse of historic property, including old mills, Caraker and Stephens said. The developer has proposed a boutique hotel with 100 rooms and a restaurant, using the oldest part of the mill, at Fourth Avenue East and Grove Street, and adding to it. Built originally in 1915, the mill got additions in 1919, 1947 and in the 1960s. It sits on 1.7 acres.
“From what I understand we’ve got a couple of big hotel developers from Charlotte that are very very interested in moving forward,” Caraker said.
Last month, the council voted to acquire an abandoned house on Fourth Avenue West behind the mill.
“We were interested in it and it came up at the right price,” Caraker said.
The city’s 2020 land-use plan shows an upgrade of Fourth Avenue, which would likely be a requirement of the developer to give hotel guests a pleasant well-lighted walk to Main Street. It’s expected that the developer would buy the property from the city. The city could pay for some public works improvements in exchange, council members said.
“We know we’re going to have to clean it up from Main to Grove,” Caraker said of Fourth Avenue. “If we can get Fourth and Grove the next logical step is Maple and Seventh Avenue.”
Stephens, too, said a hotel on the mill site could be a catalyst for jumping across U.S. 64 to the Historic Seventh Avenue District.
“It would help bridge the gap between Seventh Avenue and Main Street,” Stephens said. “We’re beginning to see some interest in developing Seventh Avenue and I think this would help that.”
Councilman Jeff Miller joined Caraker and Stephens in turning thumbs down, as out of scale, a separate idea for a five-story hotel and parking deck combination on the Dogwood lot.
The Grey Hosiery Mill is looking like the likelier site.
“I’m very optimistic that we can come up with something because I know we’re real motivated on the city side and we’ve had some interest” from developers, Miller said.


‘Change the dynamic’

Beth Carden, the executive director of the Tourism Development Authority, said a downtown hotel would significantly boost the city’s tourism base and its ability to attract small conferences. The TDA pitched in $25,000 of the study’s cost.
“I’ve talked over the years to a number of people interested in building a hotel,” Carden said. “We’ve had a lot of requests by visitors over the years telling us they wish there was a hotel where they could walk out on Main Street.”
Asked if Grove Street was close enough to satisfy that desire, Carden said it would be. In fact, she strongly endorsed the mill site for the same reason council members cited.
“It doesn’t have to be directly on Main Street,” she said. “If we had one in that location I think would open up Seventh Avenue as part of downtown in a much better way and make it more walkable. It would just really change the dynamic in a positive way of how we see downtown. It would move downtown over and out.”
Declaring that “it’s our turn,” Carden said the timing is right for a hotel with a small conference center.
“I think right now, as high as we are in tourism in North Carolina and doing as well as we are here, we are a destination people are looking at.”
She sees a strong potential market for a hotel with a minimum of 80 rooms, and preferably 100, with a meeting room that would accommodate 150 to 200 people.
“There are a lot of conferences going on in our state that are not 300. They’re in the 75 to 100 range,” she said.
“I think it would enhance what we have downtown now, not hurt it. We have two B&Bs and the Inn on Church but they can’t hold the number of people that would stay downtown…. People that already have accommodations start getting nervous about this but some people that come to a conference might prefer to stay in a bed and breakfast. There is a lot of spillover our other accommodations would see.”
A hotel with conference space could also help TDA meet a goal it often focuses on — filling rooms in the off-season between leaf color and spring.
“One of the nice things about us is we’re weather friendly,” Carden said. “We have basically a mild winter. It would bring more people here in the wintertime for conferences. It’d be a win-win for us to have a small conference center downtown.”