[Ex-Ithacan]

Yippeee, can't wait to see what the renderings look like:



Planned downtown hotel gets management, name
From Journal Staff Reports • October 2, 2008

ITHACA — The 100-room hotel planned for the east end of The Commons will be run by luxury property manager Gemstone Hotels and Resorts of Park City, Utah, and called the Hotel Ithaca, developer Rimland Equities announced Wednesday.


Plans for the hotel are under review before the Ithaca city Planning and Development Board. It's planned for a parcel of land at the corner of State and Aurora streets that Common Council voted in April to sell to Rimland Equities of Long Island. The company hopes to break ground in 2009 and open the hotel in 2011.

It will have nine stories and be a full-service boutique hotel with about 100 rooms and suites and 2,000 square feet of meeting space, Rimland said. Gemstone also plans an on-site dining and beverage establishment called Zinck's Bar, using a name that was on a series of Ithaca taverns in the late 19th and 20th centuries. The name of the $25 million hotel is tribute to the Ithaca Hotel, which stood on the same general site before being torn down in the 1960s.

Gemstone specializes in managing and marketing luxury and upscale hotel and resort properties and was named by Entrepreneur Magazine one of the 500 fastest growing companies in 2007.

“Gemstone is a name that downtowns across the country would like to have among their hotel managers,” Downtown Ithaca Alliance Executive Director Gary Ferguson said.