CHICAGO- Robert Habeeb looks carefully at aging office buildings when he walks through a downtown. In the past ten years, as the president of the Rosemont-based First Hospitality Group, a development and management firm, he has helped transform several under-appreciated properties, whether from the dawn of the skyscraper era or the pre-war fad for Art Deco, into hotels and says this niche now plays a vital role in the revival of the Midwestern region's downtowns.

“These are stately buildings and you can't replicate them today,” he says. A century ago, downtown buildings were more important to a city's identity, and architects were expected to design them with a flourish. “It's rare to find a building that doesn't measure up in terms of aesthetics.”

“But one of the keys to success in this is being selective,” Habeeb adds, since not all historic buildings, however impressive looking, will make great hotels. “The economics have to work for us to do a gut-rehab. Sometimes we look at a building's core and find serious defects,” such as a history of standing water. And others simply have poor views or space too difficult and expensive to sub-divide into hotel rooms.     

The developer's first such project was more than 10 years ago when his company helped transform the 16-story Fletcher Trust Building in Indianapolis into a Hilton Garden Inn. “We just came across the building when we were looking for a hotel site downtown and thought, maybe we can do something with this.” Designed by the architectural team of Arthur Bohn and Kurt Vonnegut, Sr., the neoclassical structure was built in 1915 and eventually listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

A reuse like this was made possible by the revival of the downtown, which brought in entertainment venues and other amenities that made it a desirable destination for out-of-towners, Habeeb says. “It's revived and rocking.”

“The entire mass exodus to the suburbs seems to have reversed,” he adds, especially in Midwestern cities, where First Hospitality does most of its work. The firm has also done rehabs in Chicago, where they transformed the top of 22 W. Monroe St. into a Hampton Inn, and in Milwaukee, where they remade the 19^th century Loyalty Building into a 127-room Hilton Garden Inn with 14-foot ceilings and a five-story grand atrium. First Hospitality has also begun work transforming the Art Deco-style Federal Office Building in Omaha into a 152-room Residence Inn by Marriott. It will open this summer. As in their other projects, the immediate neighborhood has an increasing amount of commercial activity, including a downtown minor league baseball team and a new entertainment district. “You'd be surprised what's going on in downtown Omaha.”     

“The historic reuses are a ton of fun to do, but they're not for the faint of heart,” he says. Sometimes they discover serious environmental issues, such as the presence of asbestos, or spend an enormous amount of time wrangling with historic preservationists. “They don't necessarily have much interest in the commercial needs of the project and instead concentrate on preserving the architecture as is.”

Still, Habeeb and his firm have made discoveries that make the work worthwhile. At 22 W. Monroe St. in Chicago, for example, they tore out a bunch of drywall and found “this unbelievably beautiful, ornate ceiling. You're peeling back years and years of construction activity and you never know what you'll find.”