New "Hyatt Place" Hotel on K Street: "Plain Vanilla" liquor license

1522 K Street, between Archibald's Gentlemen's Club and Fast Eddie's Sports & Billiards on one side and by the St. Regis Washington Hotel on the other, is presently a gutted shell, but some day the former office building will be a Hyatt Place Hotel. So Advisory Neighborhood Commission (ANC) 2B/Dupont Circle heard about plans to get a liquor license for the day when the space is habitable.

Not yet fit for habitation

"What we have here is a plain vanilla Class C license," said Michael Fonseca, attorney for future operators of the Hyatt Place. See an explanation of liquor license categories here.

Fonseca told the ANC the hotel would have 164 rooms. Like all hotels, it will be open 24 hours a day, but it would only be authorized to see alcohol between 8am and midnight. There will be five bar stools and 30 seats in the lobby where people might drink, plus there will be a 28-seat roof garden "for guests and private functions". The hotel will not seek an entertainment endorsement, so there will no music coming from the roof deck.

Previous reporting on the Internet says Alexandria architects Cooper Carry are helping Atlanta-based Songy Highroads LLC convert the former 91,000-square-foot office building into a hotel. Songy Highroads LLC bought the property in 2013 for an estimated $23.5 million dollars.

The protest period for the liquor license will continue until September 2, and the hearing on the liquor license will take place on November 5. See page 5 of 7 pages of liquor-license announcements here.

Since there are no residential neighbors, the liquor license application will probably experience little resistance. The ANC decided to take no action on the liquor license application.

"We've done our due diligence," said Commissioner Abigail Nichols (district 05). The hotel will be in Nichols' district.