Boston Common - Niche Media - A side of Boston that's anything but common.
Issue link: http://www.ifoldsflip.com/i/109083
In 1965 Judy Garland stayed for several months in the Lenox Hotel suite that now bears her name. Serendipity steered Irving Saunders, a real estate investor, into the hotel business in 1939. 98 Roger Saunders poses in front of The Lenox in 1966. Back Bay is Roger's turf. "He put it on the map," says Meg Mainzer-Cohen, president and executive director of the Back Bay Association. He has owned and operated the Copley Square Hotel and The Boston Park Plaza Hotel & Towers; he still owns The Lenox Hotel and holds the ground lease on The Back Bay Hotel. His eldest sons—Gary, 58, and Jeffrey, 56, who now run the Saunders Hotel Group—are on the verge of another coup: erecting 40 Trinity, a proposed 33-story hotel-and-condominium development on the site of the John Hancock The exterior Hotel & Convention Center, which the as it looks today. Saunders family bought in December 2011. It's a capstone for both the family—the most ambitious project the hotel group has ever undertaken—and the city, as it will add the missing high-rise vertebra to the spine that Boston city planners envision running from the Prudential Center tower to downtown. From their entrée into the business in 1939 with a single property, the Metropolitan Hotel, the Saunderses have risen to become the "Hub's First Family of Hoteliers," as the Boston Herald put it in 1983. Today the Saunders Hotel Group has about 450 PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF VIRTUAL TOURIST (EXTERIOR), COURTESY OF THE LENOX HOTEL (IRVING, ROGER, SUITE) O nce upon a time in America, well before Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts and The Ritz-Carlton draped their luxury chains across the country, every major city had its landmark hotel—the place to stay in town, whether the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, The Brown Palace Hotel and Spa in Denver, or the Mark Hopkins San Francisco. Each of these properties is now a chain link, owned by Hilton Worldwide, Marriott International, and InterContinental Hotels & Resorts, respectively. The independent luxury city hotel is nearly extinct. But not in Boston. "I'm an independent," says Roger Saunders, founder of the Saunders Hotel Group and the city's visionary hotel maverick, having created a local luxury lodging empire in a business dominated by international brands. (The name "Saunders" appears on none of the family's hotels.) And he says it quietly: None of the words— czar, baron, kingpin, mogul—that usually attach to real estate legends apply to Saunders, a limber, bantamweight octogenarian. He is soft-spoken and understated yet quietly confident—and when something pleases him, his entire face melts into a smile. ("This is a guy who wouldn't know how to toot his own horn if you gave it to him," says Claude Erbsen, a 43-year veteran of The Associated Press and a cousin of Roger's first wife, Nina, who died in 1991.) "I never even thought of affiliating with a national hotel brand," Roger adds. That's a mark of his stature in Boston, because when it comes to hotels, banks prefer to finance a logo, not a building. BOSTONCOMMON-MAGAZINE.COM BC_F_TheLenox_Spring13-fryda.indd 98 2/12/13 3:17 PM