Standing at a second storey window of what will soon be the Marriott Courtyard Hotel in downtown Prince George, developer Rod McLeod looked at the iconic Connaught Hill stairs and fond memories came back to him.
"When I was a kid, I lived on Pine Street and I used to come down here and go to the Strand and Princess Theatres and I would play hockey at the old Coliseum - there were no stairs there, so you can imagine trying to get up and down the hill when it was icy and we weren't smart enough to walk around it so we'd slide down to the bottom grabbing twigs to slow ourselves down," he laughed.
Fast forward to 2017 and McLeod, principal of River City Hotel Inc. and River City Ventures Inc., is hosting an exclusive tour for The Citizen of the six storey, 174-room, $35 million hotel property at Tenth Avenue and Brunswick Street.
Construction will be completed by the end of the year with an opening date in 2018, once the hotel is furnished and staff are hired and trained.
Attached to the 151,000 square foot hotel is a 3,600 square-foot space outfitted for a restaurant, which is available for lease.
The hotel has about 6,100 square feet of convention space, along with a separate meeting room that is 400 square feet.
There will also be a lounge, bistro, pool, exercise room, media room, library and laundry facilities on site to service the guests in the sound-proof 174 rooms that range in size from 340 to almost 500 square feet. Beneath the hotel will be 93 underground parking stalls.
The journey hasn't always been easy for the lifelong resident with this project. In April 2012, he announced a 12-storey hotel with 35 luxury condominiums on top. Construction was slated to start that summer with completion by the end of 2013.
Instead, site preparations didn't start until September 2013. A foundation was built that winter but then work ground to a halt in March 2014.
At the time, McLeod told The Citizen that design changes were needed and then new building permits were required but the Delta Hotel was still full steam ahead.
The site lay dormant for more than two years before Marriott Hotels of Canada revealed in May 2016 that it had replaced Delta as the hotel operator.
Utah-based PEG Development published an artist rendering of the revised hotel project on its website.
Work finally began again last July, in large part due to a $3.2-million cash injection from the City of Prince George, working with money from a development fund from Northern Development Initiative Trust, along with a 10-year tax exemption.
The extent of the city's involvement wasn't made public until a series of Citizen stories in December and January revealed the behind-the-scenes efforts to reboot the development.
For McLeod, that's water under the bridge now as construction nears completion and he can look back at what drew him to the project and kept him striving to get it done.
"It was part of the plan to revitalize the downtown," McLeod recalled.
"This whole project was brought to us in 2012 by Initiatives Prince George when Tim McEwan was CEO and the first feasibility study was done by IPG. That whole process was started back then when they were trying to bring economic activity into Prince George. I was born and raised here and so it was important to bring the best to the city and you've only got one chance to get it right."
After the idea was first brought to McLeod, he was downtown with his wife, Denise, one Sunday and after lunch they wandered down to the lot at Tenth and Brunswick.
"So there we were looking at the lot on a sunny day like this and my wife, who is not a partner in this project but is my partner in life, took a look and said 'it looks great and you guys should do this' and that's where it all started," he said.
Finishing it was always the goal but finishing it right was critical for McLeod.
In that spirit, he insisted as much wood as possible be used, so above the concrete and steel first floor, floors two to five are wood-frame fir construction.
"What was important to us for this project was to hire as many people from Prince George as we could, including trades, suppliers and engineers," he said.
"And we were able to do that. There's only a few trades from out of town that were not available here - like the guys doing the fibre cement tile - that's a specialty item."
There are 30 sub-trades from Prince George on McLeod's long list.
The rest of the project uses local businesses as much as it can, McLeod said, showing a page filled with rows of local company names listed.
"I would say 80 per cent of our trades and consultants are from Prince George and I would say there was about 35,000 hours of employment created here," McLeod added.
"There will be another 40 to 50 jobs at the hotel once it's completed and I can't say enough about Mayor Lyn Hall, the council and the City of Prince George because their support of this project has been outstanding."
