The Foshay Resurrection

But the condo boom was echoing across Minneapolis, and Burnet felt a tug at his heart as well as his wallet. “That building meant a lot to me,” he recalls. “As a kid, I took the bus from 50th and Bryant downtown to the Y for swimming lessons. We’d go to the stand at the Foshay, get a hot dog for ten cents, then go up in the observatory for five. The Foshay was part of my history.”

Negotiations took ninety days, and Burnet ended up buying the tower that cost $3.75 million to build for $15.5 million. Lest you think Burnet got taken, in today’s dollars Wilbur Foshay paid $450 million to build his monument. Burnet called in his Chambers construction team from Ryan Companies, who told him the old metal-frame windows needed replacing, but the building had good bones and there would be few surprises. But what would he do with it?

Office space was out. The Foshay’s elegant tapering design once promoted as the height of modernity (the building is forty-four-feet narrower at the top floor than at the bottom) “doesn’t lend itself to offices today,” says Burnet. Condos were an obvious choice, but Burnet knew that market intuitively and declined to play. “If you can’t have a patio and fresh air, there are lots of other high-rise options where you can,” he surmised. “Who would pay top dollar for that?”

The nascent hotelier decided it would need to be a hotel. The decision assuaged his sense of nostalgia as well. “If you build condos, you take it out of public view. Everyone has a Foshay Tower story. There’s no question the community loves the building. As a hotel, everyone can enjoy it inside and out.”

Burnet is a modernist and a serious collector of modern art. He understood the Foshay was a modernist gem and wanted to work with a hotelier with a modern aesthetic. After Ian Schrager’s trendy hotel collection on the coasts, the hippest hotel operator in America was Starwood’s W Hotels. Founder Barry Sternlicht sought to mimic Schrager’s design ethos and sense of style without the Schrager Hotels’ snobbery.

W flourished under Ross Klein, a former Polo Ralph Lauren executive who grew the brand in hip cities across the globe, securing higher average rates and occupancies than W’s sister Sheraton and Westins, which often boast larger rooms, better locations, and more amenities. The brand’s cheeky sense of humor, youthful vibe (it was one of the first to offer condoms in the minibar and gay porn on pay-per-view), and reputation for cool bars and nightlife was just the prescription for a staid hotel company, and Klein was one of the most solicited hoteliers in the world.

Burnet made inquiries. “Minneapolis was not on W’s radar,” he recalls. The closest W was in Chicago, the next ones west were on the coast (shades of 1929).

But someone got ahold of someone else and a key Starwood player had a look-see. “When they saw the building, they fell in love with it,” Burnet says. They knew Burnet had street cred. He was building a very cool hotel several blocks away, partnering with global chef Jean–Georges Vongerichten, who co-owned a company that developed restaurants for Starwood Hotels. Klein gave it the green light. W Minneapolis—The Foshay would open in 2008. (Klein left W for competitor Hilton Hotels just weeks before the opening and did not respond to requests for interviews.)

The renovation proved to be complex, and unlike at Chambers, Burnet was not in control. “New York approves everything,” he explains. “Every wastebasket, every fabric color.” Munge Leung: Design Associates of Toronto, a firm with a modern aesthetic, but few high-profile American projects, was chosen to handle the interior design—in consultation with the National Park Service. Since the Foshay had been  listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978, two decades after Foshay’s death, its restoration made the developers eligible for substantial tax credits under the Federal Rehabilitation Tax Incentive Program. “This tax credit has saved many historic buildings,” says Audrey Tepper, a historical architect who supervises preservation for the government and had responsibility for the Foshay.

“The Foshay didn’t have a lot of historic character on the upper floors [aside from Wilbur’s bilevel suite near the top],” she explains. “There was not much to repair or restore” except for the historic lobby and windows. That is until a 1980s drywall ceiling was removed from the “arcade” that leads from the building’s Marquette Avenue entry into the lobby. Underneath it was a deteriorated art deco carved-plaster and horsehair ceiling.

Tepper wanted it restored. “It seemed too destroyed,” says Burnet. Tepper “encouraged” Burnet. A few hundred thousand dollars and several months of historical craftsmanship later, what could be saved had been and what was missing was rebuilt. In the scheme of the $57 million renovation of the Foshay (not including $18 million in soft goods and furnishings), it was not much money for a lot of impact. Perhaps in exchange Burnet was given the green light to replace the building’s porous but historic windows on all floors but Foshay’s bilevel suite, which is being restored as a sedate watering hole known as Prohibition.

The other major complication in restoring the Foshay was that every couple of stories its floor-plate narrowed, necessitating fifty-seven different room layouts, preposterous in a 230-room hotel. Every three floors, plumbing and wiring tracks had to be reconfigured. And in an odd parallel to the Chambers rehabilitation—where the buildings’ floor heights did not line up, necessitating a connecting transition structure—the large two-story ground-level “pedestal” that wraps around the tower (and was built at the same time) does not line up with the tower itself, necessitating a six-foot staircase to get to the second floor meeting rooms.

Unlike the timeless minimalism of the art-filled Chambers, the W will be virtually art-free, but full of designer furnishings that take on the role of art. The effect is not entirely soothing or cohesive—each guest room is adorned with a garish magenta minibar and sofa pillow, black-and-white draperies and bedding, white built-ins and occasional tables in rounded corners and circles, plus bathrooms of white, black, and purple tones. (W relaxed its requirement that all toilets be enclosed in separate water closets on floors where it would have created airline-type claustrophobia.)

The W customer likes to party more than most travelers, says Burnet. One of Ross Klein’s inflexible charges was that each room contain at least “three places to screw,” Burnet chuckles. “I’m not making that up.” Which perhaps explains why the hotel will have one restaurant but three separate drinking spots: the aforementioned Prohibition on twenty-seven (for the space, Burnet is trying to reclaim the statue of Foshay’s girlfriend from the family of late Minneapolis hotelier Bob Short) and what is expected to be a “loud party scene” (Burnet’s words) at the W Bar and W Living Room adjacent to the restaurant on the ground floor.

Perhaps the only drama around the W’s run-up to opening came around the hotel’s restaurant. Keys Cafe, which awkwardly inhabits the old café un deux trois space, will remain, to be augmented by an all-day, 170-seat restaurant on the ground level.

“W works with Tom Colicchio and Todd English, and they’re very particular,” Burnet says. The Foshay was proceeding toward a restaurant managed by the Vongerichten/Starwood partnership, unsurprising given Vongerichten’s existing relationship with Chambers. A kitchen was built to its standard and ads for a hiring fair were posted on Craigslist, but as late as Memorial Day, two months before the hotel’s scheduled opening, no restaurateur had been announced, no contracts signed.

It’s not clear if Burnet fired Vongerichten or vice versa. Burnet says he was never nervous, but with guests booked for mid-August and the GOP convention coming to town two weeks later, “we were getting down to short strokes,” he admits. “We just never got a deal done.”