Inside the downtown Milwaukee Masonic Center before it becomes a hotel

The gray limestone walls facing Van Buren Street and inward facing stained-glass windows make the Humphrey Scottish Rite Masonic Center a bit forbidding to the surrounding downtown Milwaukee streets.

But new owners who plan to convert and expand the building into a 220-room hotel want to transform that longtime stand-offish structure into a hot spot for downtown residents and visitors, said Eric Nordeen, principal with Ascendant Holdings LLC. A tour through the inside, which is much more colorful than the exterior, shows the great potential for the building at 790 N. Van Buren St.

Ascendant Holdings, Madison, will start construction later this year to add a 14-story glass tower to the building and to restore and renovate the existing 75,000-square-foot Masonic Center into a place with several entertainment venues and restaurants. The hotel is likely to open for business in spring 2020, Nordeen said.

The Scottish Rite Masons organization bought the building for $44,000 in 1912, and have owned it ever since. It’s been available for weddings or other events, but has largely been closed off to the public and used only by the organization’s members.

The redevelopment aims to flip that. The new hotel will be run by Portland-based Provenance Hotels, which will reach out to local businesses to seek partners to run restaurants and bars within the building.

“A Provenance hotel really wants to be a place where everybody wants to go to engage in the food and beverage, or have coffee or meet people,” Nordeen said. “We intend to attract a lot of Milwaukeeans to the facility on a regular basis, in addition to overnight guests.”

March 6

The building teems with spaces that could become future hangouts. There’s a large first-floor room with an elaborately sculpted ceiling that could become a restaurant. The roof will become an open-air bar and hangout with views of the lake and downtown. The 350-seat theater space could become a smaller venue for concerts or other live performances. A basement tavern, dubbed the “Double Eagle Pub” by the Masons organization, could become a tucked-away place to catch a drink after a show.

The biggest challenge of the project will be the 14-story glass tower that will be built through and over the building. A portion of the building’s southern end will be cut out, making room for the new tower’s foundations. As Nordeen noted, the lost spaces in the building are not the grand rooms, but rather hallways with coat closets, and a basement kitchen.

“The least-desirable place on each floor happened to be stacked,” Nordeen said.

Source:  Milwaukee Business Journal