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Daily Planet Staff 

The lights are dim now in the dining room of the Hotel Shattuck Plaza, but the once-elegant space is poised to regain some of the glory of its younger days. 

Right now the downtown dowager hotel with its sparely furnished lobby and empty restaurant space looking out on Allston Way seems a little tired. 

Opened in 1910, the hotel is a city landmark and many of its architectural details have not been lost and await restoration. The Hotel Shattuck’s new general manager, Michael Moore, who supervised the recent remodeling of the Hotel Durant as manager there, intends to seek National Landmark status for the hotel. 

Pointing to the arches that face each other across the dining room, he remarked on “the sense of grandness” that could be restored to the room, which has an adjacent ballroom. 

He walked back into the lobby and noted the lowered ceiling and the pillars that are covered with nondescript wood framing and mirrors. 

“For me the ceilings can’t be high enough,” he said. 

Moore thinks there’s hidden treasure underneath the bland coverings – the originals were black marble. 

The 175-room hotel was designed by Benjamin G. McDougall and has been described as a Spanish Renaissance-style building. It covers most of a full city block, bounded by Shattuck Avenue, Allston Way, Harold Way and Kittredge Street. The Kittredge street side was built as an annex in 1914. 

In the immediate future, Moore said he would pursue only cosmetic changes, because if the hotel receives landmark status, remodeling would be subject to government guidelines. The first things he envisions are a “light and bright” dining room, to be achieved with paint and repairs, and the reopening of a food and beverage service, possibly by September. 

That opening would not be with highfalutin fanfare, but a “humble or more modest breakfast and lunch service.” 

The goal for the first year is to bring people back to the hotel, said Moore, who says he was lured away from the Hotel Durant because of the challenge and “an offer I couldn’t refuse.” 

Hotels are in his blood. His uncle Bill Moore owns the Villa Hotel in San Mateo and the Shattuck’s new manager grew up in the business. Later as a drummer in rock and roll bands and then as a lecturer, he stayed in countless hotels around the United States. 

Moore said the Shattuck has been in decline since the mid-1980s, although it underwent a $2 million renovation in 1987. 

“It has been barely maintained for a long time,” he said. “The plumbing is ancient, and that has to be addressed, and there’s no sprinkler system. We’re putting one in.” 

The Hotel Shattuck Plaza got its reprieve when it was purchased in September 1999 by the Anaheim-based Royalty Hotels chain for $8.5 million. Although the company’s president, Satish Patel, was killed in an auto accident in December, the company continues his plans for the hotel improvements. 

In the transition before the sale was completed, a number of employees left the hotel because its future was uncertain, Moore said. Currently the Shattuck is operating with a skeleton crew of about 20 people. 

The previous owners left 30 additional furnished rooms, after holding a liquidation sale for the rest. Moore said Royalty already has spent “hundreds of thousands of dollars” on new furniture and carpeting and curtains for 100 of the 175 rooms. 

The remaining rooms await repair and possible re-configuration.