Longtime employee agrees C.R. hotel needs renovation

If the city's purchase of the Crowne Plaza Five Seasons Hotel in downtown Cedar Rapids helps turn the clock back to the hotel's glory days, Helen Blietz is all for it.

“It really needs to be renovated,” says Helen, 68, a server and buffet manager since the hotel opened 32 years ago. “It needs a lot of work.”

A quick stroll through the hotel and ballrooms reveals tired carpet, scuffed baseboards, even wood veneer peeling off doors. Partitions that divide a ballroom into meeting rooms don't restrict noise as they should. Other issues make it evident that the hotel is far from being the city's crown jewel, as it was in early 1979 when it opened as Stouffer's Five Season's Hotel adjacent to the new Five Seasons Center.

“I think it needs the city to do this,” she says. “Or somebody. And the city is willing to do it.”

After about a decade, the Stouffer's name was dropped. It became the Wyndham Five Seasons Hotel for a while and, since 1997, has been known as the Crowne Plaza Five Seasons Hotel.

Several changes in ownership and management took place throughout the years, but the most notable have come in the last decade when Lodgian Incorporated ran into financial trouble. In June 2007, Kronos Hotels LLC of Atlanta bought the hotel; it subsequently ran into additional financial problems that affected the operation of the hotel and its appearance. Now owned by C.W. Capital Asset Management, which had backed Kronos, the hotel is being managed by Prism Hotels and Resorts until it closes Feb. 10.

The city has purchased the 274-room hotel for $3.2 million and will close it for at least 18 months. Officials hope to either renovate it or sell it to someone else to renovate.

“I think it's a great thing,” Helen says. “But a lot of people are sore about it because they're losing their jobs.

“Of course,” she adds, “Kronos made it go downhill. A lot of people didn't want to come back.”

That's because, at one time, employees went weeks without paychecks, vendors refused to drop off food, even florists wouldn't bring flowers. It became nearly impossible to deliver first-class service no matter how hard you worked.

“Even grocery stores or the banks wouldn't cash your checks,” Helen recalls.

But she always managed to get a paycheck, even though benefits implemented at the beginning - such as full health insurance coverage, vacation pay and a retirement plan - went away.

“Several people quit,” Helen says. “I was Old Faithful.”

In fact, Helen and her husband of 48 years, Roger, always joked that the only way she'd quit working at the hotel was if it closed its doors.

Now that she's among 125 people who will lose their jobs, Helen is considering retirement. Then again, after having each knee replaced, she may work with Dostal Catering; it will continue to serve one of her favorite lunch buffets to the Downtown Rotary, which is leaving the hotel for the Scottish Rite Temple.

“I like the work,” she says. “I like seeing the same people. They keep coming back.”

A door-to-door Avon representative as she raised their three children - Julie, Brian and Gerad - Helen applied at the hotel on a friend's recommendation.

“I started,” she says, “to earn some money to buy new living room furniture.”

“She bought kitchen furniture and bedroom furniture and ...” Roger says.

In the early years, when female workers wore skirts and high heels and the food was ultra-fancy, the hotel was the place to be. Helen ticks off the names of guests - Bon Jovi, Kiss, Marie Osmond, Randy Travis, Ted Kennedy, Al Gore. But her affinity for the place still revolves around regular guests, including the University of Iowa football team on Friday nights before home games.

Those teams, she says, had a full buffet at 6 p.m., a snack buffet at 8 p.m., a breakfast buffet in the morning and, if the game was later, a brunch buffet.

“We always joked we wondered how they could even run after all that,” she says.

“It was never as first-class as it was when it was Stouffer's,” Helen adds. “I think everybody in town had their parties there. Cedar Rapids was proud of that hotel.”

And maybe some day, she hopes, it will be again.