"Are you ready for some fierceness?" Paul Sanders asked as he prepared to show off his ideas for Hotel Blue, a concept he's preparing in order to bid for Essex Inn, 800 S. Michigan Ave.
Hotel Blue, if Sanders' bid is successful, would be the city's first full-service hotel geared towards the LGBT community. Sanders and a group of investors are preparing to make the bid in mid-June. They have already secured $21 million from a Boston-based investment fund, but are still searching for additional sources of financing.
Sanders said that, though many mainstream hotel chains try to maintain an appearance of being gay-friendly, LGBT travelers might want to be thoughtful about where they are spending their money. He refused to name the hotel group, but mentioned one hotel chain that included a certain book in each nightstand. "It's not the Gideon's Bible, but a book from a certain group, and if you go to that group's website, you can see their real views on gay marriage and other LGBT issues."
Sanders is a former United Airlines executive who was laid off in 2010. Since then he has been working on his idea for a hotel welcoming mainly all members of the LGBT community, and other travelers and local residents as well. "It's not about gay boys, lesbians, or transgender people, it's about all of us, including our fierce transgender friends," he said.
He has worked in a variety of hospitality industry positions at the same time as he's been seeking financing, to better acquaint himself with the logistics of the business, mostly with Marriott hotels in Chicago and i Hotel in Champaign, Illinois.
"Paul is coming to this with a depth of experience—he taught himself the hotel development business," said Kathleen Robbins, a co-founder and investor in Hotel Blue. "I think that the market he identified is very real."
Robbins, Sanders and co-founder and investor Anton Novak, are all Air Force veterans, and Sanders said all were interested in a project that would be gay-inclusive but give back to the community as well. Sanders' mother is also an investor in the project.
Novak, who also was an airline pilot but now runs a bakery in Reno, Nevada, said that he had "travelled around the world extensively, but [as a gay man] quite often wasn't made to feel truly welcome" in many hotels. At the same time, he added, he wants to be conscientious about not having a hyper-sexualized concept appealing only to gay men: "It's not someplace about being 20, blonde and beautiful—it's about how we come together as a community."
Sanders said that their group had already been attempting to give back to the community by donating to several local organizations, among them Equality Illinois, Center on Halsted, River North Dance and Rotary International. Novak added that the donations came from about 10% of his initial investment, spread out over three years.
Originally thinking that the project should have some proximity to Lakeview, the group first targeted their concept for the Inn at Lincoln Park. "We thought we could do it in an area that could serve a component of the LGBT community, and we worked on that for 18 months, but we were unable to secure the financing."
Sanders was also discouraged by some of the strife that had broken out in Lakeview in the summer of 2011.
"There were some issues between the younger folks in the LGBT community and what some other folks would call the 'establishment,'" he said. "That was concerning for me, especially when I read some of the comments on the stories in the Tribune and Sun-Times. There was a tone of anger, fear and exclusivity. It was hard to say where those comments were coming from, but my assumption was, people who lived in that neighborhood. It let me know that there is instability in that part of town."
After investigating a property in Las Vegas, the group eventually settled on a hotel in the Loop, which is where most of the city's hotel business is centered anyway. "In the hotel business you can't get around the economics," Sanders noted. "We want to do a hotel that serves everyone and is 'of the community.' It has to be somewhere where everyone wants to be."
The property—made viable by "being equidistant from the West, North and South Sides"—is well positioned to take advantage of two population trends. First, the South Loop has an emerging gay and lesbian presence, and, second, the Michigan Avenue corridor is home to several thousand-college students, according to Sanders.
Essex Inn is family-owned, but the current, second-generation owners have expressed interest in selling. The property has 254 rooms, and Sanders' plan calls for 249. It also calls for a few luxury suites, which he refers to as "Premiere Suites" and "Eleganza Suites," adding "Yes, I grew up in the era of Paris is Burning."
The hotel had completed a renovation in 2011, so many of the rooms and their fixtures, as well as the public spaces, are up-to-date. Sanders said that most of their own renovations would go into the hotel's underutilized pool and deck areas, which he plans to convert into an entertainment venue called "thE Extravaaganza." He would like to slightly reduce the size of the pool, and utilize the space for shows and dancing.
"It's kind of like a cruise ship," Sanders said. "It's an environment where moms and moms, and dads and dads, come with their kids in the day, and, at night, they can leave their kids with a sitter—which we'll have—and come up for the show." He added that business travelers required by work to stay at nearby convention hotels would also be likely clienteles.
Sanders, Robbins and Novak all said they were concerned that the space not just be aimed at wealthy gay men, and said the price for rooms would initially hover between $175-200 on regular occasions.
"Chicago is an expensive hotel market," Sanders said. "In Chicago, $199 and below suggests 'affordability.' We have a strategy which prices just a little bit lower for everyone. Some of our guests will be people who can't afford to be [staying at a hotel] up on North Michigan Avenue."
Robbins added, "It's not going to be a sterile environment. It's going to be someplace cheap, hip and welcoming."
"We're not looking to be the White Party host hotel—we are looking to be an experience that the entire community can be proud of," Sanders noted, adding that he looked forward to the day when a "Hotel Blue" sign illuminated out onto the Chicago skyline. "People would see that and say, 'Look at what Chicago did."
The name, incidentally, was chosen for two reasons. The first was symbolism of the color blue as it exists within the central part of a rainbow, encircled by the other colors. The second is that, "Blue is the name of my much loved, and long-gone, English bulldog," Sanders said. "I can't help it, I'm gay as hell."
