Hotel Callista opening in former Norwich Elks Club
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Jan. 22—NORWICH — The eastern gateway to Main Street is beginning to shine, with the opening of the new Hotel Callista in the bright white former Elks Club mansion on one side and work beginning on the former YMCA across the street.
Hotel Callista received city approval to open last week and unveiled its website, www.hotelcallista.com for reservations on Friday. The first event it will host will be the Norwich Community Development Corp., which will hold its annual meeting in the hotel ballroom the morning of Feb. 1. NCDC and the Greater Norwich Area Chamber of Commerce will host a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the hotel following the meeting at 10 a.m.
NCDC President Kevin Brown said the agency chose Hotel Callista to host its annual meeting as part of its theme to celebrate emerging development, funded in part by the city's federal American Rescue Plan Act grants.
"Today you look across the street (from the hotel), and you see Mattern Construction beginning work at the YMCA," Brown said Monday. "A year from now, someone might be in sitting in their hotel room and look out to see the brewery-restaurant and say, 'I want to eat there tonight.'"
Hotel Callista received a matching grant of $165,283 from the ARPA-funded Norwich Revitalization Program toward the $750,000 hotel renovation project. Across the street, the cleanup of the blighted YMCA property received a $2 million state grant and $400,000 from the Norwich Revitalization Program, Brown said.
"It's all about the eastern gate to the downtown," Brown said.
Amit Patel, hotel manager, said Monday he is pleased to be hosting the event, as he hopes to spread the news by word of mouth at first that the boutique hotel is open for business, with rooms of varying sizes and shapes, ranging from singles to luxury suites. The hotel is listed with hotel booking services and travel websites, Patel said.
Work is not yet done, however. The long elegant wooden bar is not yet open and will be closed off at first while renovations continue. The kitchen adjacent to the ballroom will take another year to open, as the existing stove ventilation hoods do not meet new building regulations and must be replaced, he said.
"I feel like we're at the 50% mark," Patel said Monday.
Patel and his wife, Sima Patel, both 43, who moved to Norwich a year ago, have been in hotel management for the past 15 years in Pennsylvania and New Jersey and have done some partial renovations in some locations. This is their first total renovation, turning the former club, which later became a dinner theater and then a Chinese restaurant.
It was vacant when the ownership group, Ganesha Hospitality LLC, purchased it in May 2019 for $400,000 from RCN Capital LLC. The Greek-style mansion was the home of industrial magnate and education philanthropist John Fox Slater.
Patel said he initially wanted to name the hotel Chelsea, but the name was taken by an entity in New York. Given the building's classic Greek architecture, he started researching Greek names.
Callista, he said, means "beautiful building."
