In the previous post, Retired Guy and I looked at the oldest Providence hotel, the '20s-era Biltmore. Today we look at the newest: the Renaissance (a luxury brand of the Marriott chain). The hotel opened to great acclaim last summer in what had been a noble-looking white elephant: the Masonic Temple building between the State House and the Providence Place mall.In its renovation, the Temple's Hellenic facade was preserved, but the interior is new, and the resulting hotel is stunning, inside and out. (It was also the busiest of all those we looked at, with a large group of "foreclosure prevention" experts from around the country checking out and another group checking in while Retired Guy and I waited to view a room.)
Actually, we were shown a couple of rooms, for $159 and $179. The additional $20 would have bought us a room with a stunning view of the State House dome. (Rooms on certain floors in the hotel look out on an ornamental balustrade, so they don't offer such a clear view beyond it.)All the hotel staff we met seemed right on top of things and used to dealing with large numbers of check-ins and check-outs: You would have thought the place had been open far longer than a few months. The hotel's style is luxury contemporary, with the interesting twist that its interior incorporates colorful swirls of graffiti-style art. (Over the many decades that the Temple was abandoned, it was a notorious graffiti magnet.)
On the hotel's lower floor, with its own street entrance, is Temple-Downtown restaurant, which is one of the city's hot spots, with very good food and a lively bar scene.
All in all, we liked the Renaissance a lot, the only slight negative being its somewhat removed location: It's an easy walk from the hotel to the mall, but to get to the rest of downtown, you have to find your way across the worst intersection in the city,
either by taking a circuitous path crossing three multi-lane highways or by finding your way over the skywalk through the Westin. Not surprisingly, the foreclosure-preventers that we talked to said that during their week-long visit, they'd seen nothing of Providence but the hotel and the mall, and had dined mostly in the mall restaurants.Next: the Westin
