For much of the past four decades, the former Zahn’s department store building in Racine cast a dark shadow on an up-and-coming downtown that has long struggled with blight and economic disinvestment.
Once home to Racine’s premier shopping destination, the 50,000-square-foot, four-story department store was abandoned after Zahn’s went out of business in the early 1980s. The historic property remained vacant until late 2019, when plans for a new boutique hotel promised to breathe life into the northwest corner of downtown’s central Monument Square.
Four years later, the 80-room Hotel Verdant – which opened its doors at 500 Main St. in early August following a $40 million adaptive reuse project led by Milwaukee-based Dominion Properties – stands as a symbol of forward movement for the downtown community and surrounding businesses.
“Having that previously vacant building for so long was sort of this constant reminder that we still aren’t making enough progress. But now, with (the hotel) anchored there, it has really transformed Monument Square,” said Kelly Kruse, executive director of Downtown Racine Corp., which organizes more than 80 public events per year to help drive traffic and business to downtown Racine. Its annual Party on the Pavement in September is considered the largest street festival in southeastern Wisconsin and this year drew 20,000 people.
Hotel Verdant’s 80 rooms – including a mix of queen, king, and junior and presidential suites – are divided between the former Zahn’s building and a 26,660-square-foot, four-story addition built on to the south side of the original building. The hotel features a first-floor restaurant, dubbed Marguerite, a rooftop cocktail lounge, called Eave – with panoramic views of downtown Racine and Lake Michigan – and a 3,500-square-foot event space for groups of up to 200 people.
Business impact
Kruse highlighted two other “anchor” businesses along Monument Square that have helped raise its profile as the hub of downtown activity: Lakeview Pharmacy, which recently completed an interior and exterior renovation project under new ownership, and The Maple Table, a farm-to-table restaurant that opened in 2019 in a remodeled former Subway shop.
“The transformation of our Monument Square has been a catalyst and offers us the opportunity to display that we are making progress,” said Kruse.
Hotel Verdant and its two restaurant concepts are among 70 businesses, ranging from beauty salons to real estate agencies, that have opened physical locations in downtown Racine since 2021, said Kruse. Many of those businesses now stand to benefit from the increased foot traffic and exposure a new hotel can bring to a downtown neighborhood.
“We do get a lot of visitors from the Milwaukee and Chicago areas – it’s such an easy, day-trip drive – and this should really help catapult more people to come down for the day and have a beautiful stay (at Hotel Verdant),” she said.
As Racine’s only full-service, boutique hotel property, Verdant is expected to draw locals and visitors alike. It particularly serves a need for higher-end lodging options suitable for out-of-town execs or clients of the larger companies in the area, such as S.C. Johnson, Johnson Outdoors, Modine and Case IH.
“All of these large businesses are looking for a quality place to have people stay when they come into town and they previously had to send them to Milwaukee,” said Mike O’Connor, co-principal and chief executive officer of Dominion Properties.
Community investment
When O’Connor and partner Christopher Adams embarked on Dominion’s first-ever hotel project – with CG Schmidt as the general contractor and The Kubala Washatko Architects and Chicago-based Gettys Group as the designers – sustainability was at the forefront of their vision. Beyond the use of chemically neutral materials throughout the construction process, the building features a green roof, solar panels, wind turbines generating on-site energy and an underground heating and cooling system.
From a consumer-facing standpoint, the hotel was designed to serve as “Racine’s living room,” replete with cozy common spaces and roughly 200 works of original local art hanging on the walls of guest rooms and public areas thanks to a partnership between Dominion Properties and the Racine Art Museum.
To that end, the developer enlisted South Carolina-based Charlestowne Hotels to operate the property. With 42 hotels in 18 states – including now two in Wisconsin – Charlestowne specializes in managing adaptive reuse developments and properties located in secondary markets, which made Hotel Verdant a “dream” client, said CEO Kyle Hughey in a statement, calling Racine a “hidden gem tucked between Milwaukee and Chicago.”
“We needed somebody who had done this before, and they’re very capable,” O’Connor said of Charlestowne’s management style.
While Hotel Verdant was Dominion’s first project in Racine, it likely won’t be its last. The company bought the adjacent 4,000-square-foot building just south of the hotel with plans for a possible expansion of the hotel or to fill it with a complementary business. O’Connor also hinted of some other “secret projects” in the works.
The hotel is also not the only major project being added to downtown Racine. Just three blocks north, the Breakwater 233 luxury apartment complex is under construction for an expected August 2024 completion. Kruse said the project will provide some much-needed density to an often-quiet part of town.
“We don’t have a lot of market-rate apartments in the downtown district, so that should be a really nice catalyst because, as you can imagine, you need people living downtown with discretionary incomes in order to help those businesses survive Monday through Thursday, when maybe there aren’t as many events going on,” she said.
