Ridpath name will be the same
A Las Vegas hotelier said he paid $6.75 million for the historic Ridpath Hotel in downtown Spokane in a sale that closed Friday.
Douglas Da Silva, owner of the Artisan Hotel in Las Vegas and several other properties, said he plans to keep the hotel open under the same name.
“The thing’s been there 100 years. Why change it?” Da Silva said. “It’s kind of like if I bought Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, I wouldn’t change the name.”
Da Silva does, however, plan to change operations, starting with outsourcing many functions, including the laundry, housekeeping and food service. He anticipates reducing the employee count from 56 to 16, he said, and is looking for a new restaurant to lease the top floor space that used to hold Ankeny’s. He also plans to sell the Halliday Building, the 10,000-square-foot retail building on the hotel’s east side.
“We intend to reopen the café and lounge on the ground floor as quickly as we can, as soon as we can get through the state of Washington’s liquor licensing,” he said. “We will operate that ourselves.”
Longer term plans are not as clear. Da Silva said he and his wife, Ninette, need to get a handle on the day-to-day operations of the hotel before they determine what future renovations may be needed.
“It’s not a bad property right now,” he said. “There are some areas that are a little tired but for the most part, it’s a clean, neat property.”
Da Silva bought the property from Red Lion Hotels, which in November 2004 embarked on a campaign to sell several commercial and hotel properties and use the proceeds to renovate rooms at its remaining hotels. Julie Langenheim, investor relations manager for Red Lion Hotels, said the Ridpath has 265 rooms and 60 below-ground parking spaces.
“Mr. Da Silva takes over completely at the end of business tonight,” Langenheim said Monday. “We’re happy we found a buyer and hope it has a great economic impact on downtown Spokane.”
The First Avenue portion of the Ridpath — referred to as the Executive Court — was sold separately in January to a group of investors including Tomlinson Black Commercial CEO Dave Black. They plan to convert it into condominiums with ground-floor retail space.
Da Silva, who is originally from southern California, said he has been in the real estate business since 1978, specializing in hospitality since 1992. He said he has owned as many as 15 hotels and currently owns five. He said he’d never been to Spokane before he found out about the Ridpath sale from Loopnet.com, a real estate Web site.
“It looked like a good deal,” he said. Since then, he’s spent time in Spokane and has found it to be a “picturesque” city with a “lovely business climate. It seems to be a very clean city, very pro-growth.”
The Ridpath first opened in 1900 and is the oldest continuously operating full-service hotel in Spokane, according to hotel information. The hotel has been restored twice following fires and expanded across First Avenue in 1959.