HAVE YOU HEARD?
McMenamins Downtown Hotel
**** Opening mid 2010 ****

You may have heard that we're opening up a new property, the Crystal Hotel – this one right in downtown Portland, just blocks from the legendary Crystal Ballroom! The building has an incredible history since its inception in 1911. Throughout its near-century, the site changed hands and names many times, offering a hotel (Hotel Alma, Hotel Georgian, Hotel Tait, Majestic Hotel), men's bath house (Club Baths, Club Portland) and night club (Club Mecca, The Desert Room, Stark Street Station, Flossie's, Silverado), among other uses.
 
Interestingly, connections between the new hotel site and other McMenamins properties abound. For example, the land on which McMenamins Edgefield hotel now stands was owned in the 1850s by Hiram and Hannah Smith, who lived in the same block as the new hotel lot. In another uncanny example, a child named Grace Connelly lived in a home on the site of what is today known as Ringlers Annex pub, adjacent to the new hotel site; Connelly later taught elementary school for 43 years at what is now McMenamins Kennedy School hotel.
 
The Crystal Hotel is scheduled to open in mid 2010 and will have 50 hotel rooms on the 2nd, 3rd and 4th floors of the building. This project is McMenamins' first full-service establishment in downtown Portland. The company will commemorate, through original artwork and historic photographs, the property's evolution from pioneer residence to a tire shop along the city's original Auto Row to a live jazz club to—most recently and significantly—part of Portland's gay triangle.
 
The first floor of the hotel will house a full-service restaurant offering breakfast, lunch and dinner with a menu that celebrates fresh, seasonal ingredients abundantly available throughout the Pacific Northwest, and will feature outdoor seating along S.W. Stark and 12th Streets. The basement will offer a heated saltwater soaking pool and spa-like massage rooms, along with a Subterranean Cellar Bar that will connect with McMenamins Ringlers Annex pub next door.

Hiring is not being done at this time. When positions become available, they will be listed and applications will be accepted on our online employment pages.
 
Perhaps most exciting is the new hotel's one-block proximity to the Crystal Ballroom, another of McMenamins' properties, that has offered live national music acts since the 1920s to the present, ranging from Rudolph Valentino to the Grateful Dead to Modest Mouse. The Crystal Ballroom also serves as an elegant event and meeting space for celebrations and gatherings of all types. The new hotel is envisioned as the ideal partner to the Crystal for concert-goers, wedding parties, business retreats and more.
 
To book an event at the Crystal Ballroom, just a block away from our new downtown hotel:
Group Sales: Dineen Vallance
 
For media inquiries, interviews and photo requests:
Marketing Director: Renee Rank
 
To contribute stories, photos and memorabilia from the building:
Company Historian: Tim Hills