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Every
visitor to Olas Altas beach is struck (“assaulted” might be a better word)
by the sheer arrogant ugliness of the Tower of Evil, alias the Bank of Mexico
tower, rising from among the attractive old buildings like the ones it laid
to waste. Fewer complain about the old Freeman Hotel, another totally inappropriate
piece of boxy architecture poking up above the Malecón like an upraised
index finger. But local residents have always been aware of the abandoned
carcass painted with tacky ads and modern graffiti. And wished somebody
would either fix it up or blast it down. One local, staring up at the weather-beaten
balconies, was heard to say, “Where are those Arab terrorists when you need
them?” No help there, but those who want to see the place open, or at least
painted, are in luck—after sitting empty for nineteen years—it is under
new management, under reconstruction, and under way to open it’s doors for
guests this September. As out-of-place as the eleven-floor hotel looks these
days, it was an even more dramatic departure when Engineer Guillermo Freeman
first built it in 1946. At a time when local architectural technique was
basically about piling up blocks and plastering them over, Ing. Freeman’s
use of ferro cement—learned in the United States—was revolutionary. The
Freeman was the first actual “skyscraper” on the coast and the concept was
widely ridiculed: a sort of “Guille’s Folly”. But it quickly replaced the
classy old Belmar as the premier hotel on the Olas Altas strip, in Mazatlán,
and in the Northwest. People came for miles to dine in the Sky Room on the
tenth floor, and booked balcony rooms years ahead of the Carnival celebrations.
But time moved on, and the mainstream of Mazatlán tourism flowed north:
around to the DeCima and Hacienda in Playa Norte, along the new Malecón,
to the Golden Zone, and apparently on north indefinitely. The Freeman closed
its doors, except for various sporadic attempts to reopen it for various
Carnivals. But now Olas Altas, and the entire old Historic Zone is experiencing
a rebirth, mostly fueled by an influx of foreigners who like the funky old
style. So interest in re-opening the “white elephant” increased. The building
was sold to a buyer widely associated with export businesses of the type
that the DEA frowns on, but he experienced one of the reversals so common
in that industry—an execution-style downsizing—and the old hotel was on
the block again. The current buyers, the Posada Del Rio chain out of Torreon,
renamed it the Hotel Posada Freeman (name presumably courtesy of their Department
of Redundancy Department) and made a bold commitment to over thirty million
pesos worth of improvements. Which have been going on for months. The building
was stripped right down to the concrete. The old wooden doors and windows
were pulled and replaced by modern aluminum. Floor tiles replaced. Bathrooms
totally retiled in gay splashes of color. The lobby reconstructed in a more
modern design. Balcony rails redone in wrought iron. Complete new wiring
and plumbing. Air-conditioning throughout. The enormous exterior painted
canary yellow (not the greatest idea, maybe, but much better than the previous
Dirt Grey). The whole, suffice it to say, nine yards. The remodel, enough
of a job in a building of that size and age, has been made trickier by the
commitment to retaining the basic look and feel of the original design scheme.
The goal is that those who visited the place twenty years ago would immediately
recognize the new interior. Those parameters are being met very well under
the very professional direction of Engineer Felix David Gutiérrez, whose
experience with hotels is shaping the old building up in very attractive
style. Of course, there are limitations that can’t be readily overcome.
The rooms are small, essentially slots of view balconies—not really a problem
for most guests, I would imagine. What are you going to do in a seafront
tower like that, play “Twister”? The elevators are old, small and sloooooow—and
there are only two of them. The stairs are fast though—going down. But overall,
the construction people have brought about a good compromise between the
old and new—which is what these Lazarus projects aspire to. On the marketing
side of things, however, the company seems to suffer from the Kevin Costner
Syndrome—“If you rebuild it, they will come.” Although prices in the seventy
rooms and ten suites are not yet established, they are projected |
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as roughly equivalent to Golden Zone hotels. Locals have been asking, “Why
would anybody stay in a hotel across a noisy, bus-infested street from the
small, dirty Olas Altas beach, when for the same money they could stay right
on the sand out in the Zona Dorada?” And, “Why do think they are going to
be able to charge that sort of money on the same street where two other
old hotels can’t come close to full occupancy at under thirty dollars a
night?” The company replies with a sort of wish-fulfillment: essentially
the idea that the Freeman is so famous and big and just plain cool that
people will flock from all over Mexico and North American just to see what’s
it like and say they stayed there. Well, they may be right, but since marketing
surveys are totally unknown in this economy/culture they are going to have
to find out the hard way. They’ve built it; let’s see who comes. There are
rumors that the Del Rio outfit is good at promoting group tours, and that
they can scoop up buses full of people in places like Guadalajara and Guanajuato
and ship them merrily down to the Freeman, all expenses included. But nobody
in the company mentions that: they just stress that they know how to run
hotels. In fact, that idea came up repeatedly in answer to another common
question from Inquiring Minds: Why spend all this money to be in the hotel
business in an area where existing hotels are slowly sinking, instead of
converting the old hulk into forty or fifty apartments, which are in great
demand? Rent them out for five hundred dollars a month, this logic goes
on, and you end up making more money, year round, without having to pay
a staff or market the place. The company’s reply to that—We don’t know much
about apartments, we know how to run hotels. Well, actually most people
wish them luck. Nobody wants to see the damn thing sit vacant another twenty
years, for one thing. And the Freeman does have some advantages. It’s located
in the fun, interesting, laidback, historic, culturally alive Old Mazatlán
area, instead of the sterile, hectic, boring, overpriced, unfriendly Golden
Zone, for another. It has the view, not only from the rooms but also from
the restaurants, bars, and salóns on the top floors. There is no doubt in
anybody’s mind that the restaurants and bars on the top floor will be well-attended.
The setting is dramatic and view spectacular. If you don’t like staring
straight down at the surf patterns or out to sea for miles, get a table
on the north side for the city/territorial outlook. Or ogle the vista to
the south, peering down into the domed mansions and “ladder streets” of
Cerro Vigia. If they are even reasonably adept with the large, remodeled
kitchen, they should have a hit dining spot on their hands. I don’t even
know if they were smart enough to put dining rooms on top of the El Cid
or Moro, but even if they did, this one is cooler because there are things
to look at. The company claims a five star rating but, quite apart from
the fact that hotels are not usually rated before they are completed, that
is unlikely to be true. They also call their rooftop swimming pool “semi-Olympic”,
a term not generally applied to something waist-deep and about twenty feet
square (or to anything, come to think of it). They think thirty parking
spaces will be adequate for their eighty units, and they might be right
about that. They are converting part of the parking strip in front into
a garden—a benefit to locals from recently hustled-in laws giving all hotel
owners, not just the ones who lavishly backed the mayoral campaign of future-ex-mayor
Jorge Pasos, carte blanche to rearrange public streets as they see fit.
The overall impact of the resurrection on the neighborhood should be a good
one. If the hotel succeeds in making money and staying open, it will be
a very good impact. Not as good as apartments would be, but good. One thing
people seem to agree on about the Posada Del Rio folks, they are pretty
decent neighbors. (They could have converted the strip into valet parking,
for instance.) The bottom line: after all the dust and noise, all the false
starts, all the second-guessing, all the idle years, the Freeman is going
to live again. It might be a keystone for economic progress in Olas Altas,
it might not. It will absolutely offer Mazatlán guests and residents a great
place to go out for dinner, drinks or dancing—or just to soak in a pool
eleven stories above the surf. And it is already better than the eyesore
we’ve been seeing since 1983. I think everybody in Old Mazatlán will be
welcoming the opening of the new Freeman, and wishing them lots of luck.
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