Former hotel near is Westport is now getting demolished. What’s next for site
A former hotel near Westport and the Country Club Plaza is now being demolished for a future surface parking lot, but a city permit for the lot won’t last forever.
Demolition work has begun on the former Embassy Suites hotel site, off Broadway Boulevard at 220 W. 43rd St. The hotel property has been owned by the nearby Saint Luke’s hospital since the 1970s.
The hospital previously leased the property out but the last company that ran the hotel opted to turn in the keys last year. Saint Luke’s explored options for the building, such as converting it into apartments or senior housing, but determined they were not feasible, and the former hotel building is considered obsolete.
Saint Luke’s now plans to replace the hotel building with a gated surface parking lot for its staff. Demolition is expected to be complete within the next two months, and parking lot construction will begin right after, a spokesperson told The Star.
But, hospital representatives have said, the surface lot will be an interim use, suggesting it may not remain that way in the long term. Saint Luke’s is currently working on a new master plan for its campus and properties, which hasn’t been updated since 2009, showing the vision for what could be built in the years to come.
“We don’t know what it’s going to contain,” Aaron March, an attorney representing Saint Luke’s, said of the future plan during a public hearing last week. “Is it all hospital buildings? Is it office buildings? Is it multifamily? Is it neighborhood-supporting retail? We don’t know, but it is a true master planning undertaking where the neighborhood will be engaged.”
That plan will include a vision for the former hotel property. The city’s plan commission and zoning board signed off on a special permit for the parking lot that will expire in three years.
March said the hospital will bring a development plan back to the city showing what’s expected for the former hotel property’s future.
In the meantime, he said Saint Luke’s “sorely needs” the new parking lot until new parking garages are possibly built and to help get employee vehicles off neighborhood streets as the future plan is carried out.
City staff expressed concerns about the parking lot plan, saying it doesn’t align with long-term planning and walkability goals for the midtown area and neighbors’ desire to see less surface parking in the neighborhood.
“There’s been a pattern in this portion of midtown for the destruction of buildings, bulldozing of buildings for surface parking,” city planner Luke Ranker said at a hearing last week. “That is the opposite of what the Midtown-Plaza plan calls for.”
The Plaza Westport Neighborhood Association has expressed concerns about demolitions and vacancies on property owned by Saint Luke’s or its affiliates, including the Temple Slug building and nearby homes.
“What we are left with is surface parking lots available for use only by St. Luke’s, that are largely vacant on the weekends,” neighborhood association president Robert Martin wrote in a letter to the zoning board.
March said during the hearing last week that Saint Luke’s has invested and helped develop or renovate dozens of single-family homes and hundreds of multi-family units in the neighborhood.
The neighborhood association continued to call on the city to change its parking lots rules and definitions to legally allow Saint Luke’s lots to be used by the public when they are not needed by employees, especially given the nearby streetcar stop.