Boston Common - Niche Media - A side of Boston that's anything but common.
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outstanding bill by giving the hotel portraits of George and Martha Washington. Judy Garland holed up here in 1965 for a couple of months. "She would entertain people off the street," Roger recalls, "people down on their luck." (The room she stayed in, which formerly housed Roger's—and An original then Gary's and Jeff's—office, was later room key. named the Judy Garland Suite.) Ninth-, 10th-, and 11th-floor rooms have expansive views of the Charles River and Back Bay, which is probably why Boston Celtics coach Arnold "Red" Auerbach lived in Room 900 for 13 years. "He ate pistachios like they were going out of style," Roger says. Among the A-list guests over the years: George H.W. Bush, Tony Bennett, Michelle Pfeiffer, John Travolta, John Kerry, Adam Sandler, Andy Garcia, Marc Cohn, Patti LuPone, Anne Hathaway, Hunt Slonem, Dr. Jane Goodall, Helena Bonham Carter, and Katie Couric. The Expansion While The Lenox may be the star property today, it was the Statler Hilton purchase, in December 1976, that put the family firmly in the big leagues of Boston real estate. Roger bought the Statler, once one of the city's premier hotels, on a handshake, with no cash and a relatively small mortgage, and went on to make a success of what was regarded as a corpse. "It was a once-in-a-lifetime deal. I was $1 million ahead," says Roger, who renamed the hotel The Boston Park Plaza Hotel & Towers. The Statler purchase showed a side of the company—its penchant for deals with a civic benefit—that has been a hallmark of the Saunders Hotel Group ever since (SEE SIDEBAR). Roger saw value in the property, but he also bought it to save a Boston landmark and hundreds of jobs, he says. "I don't like to give him credit, because he's on the other side," says Domenic M. Bozzotto, then president of the Boston local of the Hotel, Restaurant, Institutional Employees & Bartenders International Union, "and he's a tough cookie, but for the hotel industry in Boston, he's been very good." How could he succeed when Hilton couldn't? asked sour skeptics. But Roger, who had written a report for Hilton a few years before on how to revive the Statler, did just what he said should be done: invest in the property, build new restaurants, and turn it into two hotels—hence the "towers," which were more luxurious than the main building. The Boston Park Plaza Hotel & Towers is a leviathan: a 1-million-squarefoot building with more than 1,000 guest rooms, 7,000 doors, 200 miles of molding, two acres of glass—and the first hotel in America to have radios in every room. It is where Roger's son Gary, now chairman of the Saunders Hotel Group, cut his teeth in the business. He started in the engineering department. "I learned about chillers, boilers, and sewage ejection pumps," he says. His face still lights up at the memory—and the fact that his desk was in his father's office. "That was the best education I could have had." At the same time, his brother Jeffrey was the shift manager at The Lenox, and the two competed vigorously. "Jeffrey had the best occupancy rate," Gary says. "I had the best revenue per room." Roger's two younger sons, the twins Todd and Tedd, 52, also found their careers at the Park Plaza. Todd went into hotel renovation and was in charge of almost all the renovations at the Copley Square, the Park Plaza, and The Lenox, and Tedd, now chief sustainability officer for the company, discovered his life's inspiration in, of all places, the basement. "I saw bales of cardboard and volumes of stuff that was being discarded," he says, and that started him on the green road. His brothers admit that in the late 1980s, none of them really understood the point of Tedd's green thinking, but the family signed off on his initiative and never looked back. He cut the Park Plaza's laundry water use from 8 million gallons to 4 million by recycling the last rinse cycle. He found a recycling center to take the hotel's thousands of old phone books, instituted a sheetand-towel reuse option, and not only installed low-flow toilets but also located a construction company to take away the old units and grind them up into roadbed. Then he took his crusade to The Lenox—remanufactured soy-based ink toner cartridges, filtered water and ice on every floor, the first electric-vehicle charging station at a Boston hotel, the landmark sign refitted with LED lights—and when he was done, The Lenox became the first third-party-certified climate-neutral hotel in the US. The Saunderses' close involvement with the various properties made it difficult for them to sell when circumstances dictated. They sold the Philanthropy started at home, with the brothers' allowances. "One-third had to go to charity, one-third had to be saved, and one-third we could spend." —TODD SAUNDERS The Pergola room occupied what is now the lobby, City Bar, and City Table. The vast space changed in the 1940s with the addition of the second floor. 100 BOSTONCOMMON-MAGAZINE.COM BC_F_TheLenox_Spring13-fryda.indd 100 2/12/13 3:17 PM