NEW YORK— As dump trucks continued to clear the dwindling tons of debris marking where the World Trade Center once stood, across the street May 16 children were singing, bands were playing, and hoteliers and politicians smiled: The once battered and broken Embassy Suites Battery Park City was officially back in business. New York State Governor George Pataki presided over a ribbon-cutting ceremony that drew hundreds of people— hotel workers, local residents, area employees, even recovery workers from Ground Zero— and marked the return of the $124 million, 463-unit all suites hotel, which held a soft reopening earlier this month. Owned by Brooklyn, NY-based Forest City Ratner Companies FCRC, Embassy Suites Battery Park City is the 14-story hotel component of a mixed-use development of 617,000 square feet of retail/commercial space and a 16-screen United Artists/Regal Entertainment Group Cinema, which also reopened, and part of the financial district’s Battery Park City master-planned community. The North End Ave. complex, adjacent to the World Financial Center, was shuttered following Sept. 11, with the hotel serving for weeks as a rest and triage area for rescue workers. “Lower Manhattan isn’t just going to come back to where we were on the morning of September 11,” said Pataki. “We’re going to move far beyond and have a better, more optimistic and stronger twenty-first century community in lower Manhattan and it’s not going to take as long as some people think. We’re going to move quickly and appropriately.” Standing in front of the building’s gleaming façade, Mark Snyder, svp-brand management for Embassy Suites, told HOTEL BUSINESS®, “It’s been overwhelming. Literally, four months ago it was hard for us to see this day. After 9/11 we really didn’t know whether or not this hotel would be able to open or what customers’ reactions would be to staying in downtown New York.” As far as the Embassy Suites goes, that reaction has been good. Since it quietly reopened May 1— with 90% of the previous staff returning— occupancy has been growing each week, said Snyder. “The weekends have been extremely strong. We’re sold out starting tonight [Thursday, May 16] and through this weekend, and we were sold out last weekend with the Tribeca Film Festival. Business demand in the downtown market is here, too. It’s at a lesser rate than it was pre-9-11— we would expect that. The approach we’re taking in reopening the hotel really is to build the demand.” Rates are averaging 30% below where they were pre-9/11, but Snyder said he’s encouraged with the return of American Express to its nearby headquarters, along with Merrill Lynch and other top demand producers that the hotel had before the attacks. “We know that’ll do great things for our occupancy,” he predicted. “Welcome home,” Bruce Ratner, President/CEO of FCRC told the gathered crowd, lauding the efforts of rescue workers and hotel staff alike during the 9-11 crisis. “Damage to the hotel, movie theater and restaurants was substantial. We’ve worked hard these last eight months to fully clean and repair this complex. While this year may be challenging, we were determined to reopen— and now we are back. We will not be deterred…we are ready again to play an active role in this very important community called lower Manhattan, ” he said. “It’s an incredible sign of the progress that’s been made since 9-11,” Matthew Messinger, svp of FCRC’s hotel development division, told HOTEL BUSINESS® “Everybody from our loyal hotel customers to the local neighborhood are really embracing the complex as a whole, and we’re going to try to be there for them and be what they want us to be for the next year or two as the neighborhood continues to come back together.” With just two years in the industry and two hotels in its portfolio (FCRC also owns the $120 million, 444-room Hilton Times Square), Messinger said the billion-dollar commercial developer’s focus has shifted somewhat. Last September, Messin
George Pataki & Deiter Huckestein