Dec. 13–The long vacant, historic Plaza Hotel building in Downtown El Paso will be remade into a 131-room, upscale boutique hotel with an adjacent, 540-car parking garage.

The project will cost about $78 million, and it will be financed by El Paso billionaire Paul Foster and millions of dollars in federal, state and city tax incentives, said William Kell, vice president of Franklin Mountain Management, a Foster company that manages many of his properties and other business ventures.

The City Council in September approved a term sheet that would provide Foster's company with about $23 million in city and state hotel tax rebates, property tax abatements and other incentives to renovate the Plaza. A final incentives agreement is scheduled to go to the City Council in January.

Kell on Tuesday revealed details of Foster's plan to renovate the 88-year-old, 19-story building on the corner of Mills Avenue and Oregon Street in the heart of Downtown El Paso.

Construction is set to begin in January, and the hotel is expected to be open in spring 2019.

Kell and El Paso architect Bill Helm, co-owner of In Situ Architecture, the project's consulting architectural firm, gave a tour of the now-gutted hotel, which has only a few remaining interior remnants of its once glorious past.

The red-brick exterior of the hotel, which closed in the early 1990s, will remain intact.

"The personality and the romance and the aura of the 1930s will be incorporated into the design of the building," Kell said standing on the gutted ground floor covered with terra cotta tile — one of the historic features that will be restored.

The hotel was one of the first hotels built by Conrad Hilton, founder of the Hilton Hotel chain, Kell said.

"The Plaza Hotel was the best-performing hotel" among a handful of hotels Hilton ran during the Great Depression, Kell said.

Kell said that according "Be My Guest," Hilton's autobiography, "this hotel saved him from financial ruin."

Helm said the Plaza Hotel is an icon of El Paso and playing a part in bringing it back to life is special. His 5-year-old firm also is involved in restoring Downtown's Blue Flame building into mostly low-income apartments. That's another Foster building that Foster plans to sell to the Housing Authority of the City of El Paso, which is renovating the vacant office building.

The Plaza building has an art-deco architecture with a "Mesoamerica twist,"' Helm said.

The renovation will return the hotel building to Hilton's vision, Helm said.

That means tearing out a concrete second floor added in the 1970s to reveal 88-year-old, large chandeliers still hanging from a ceiling and steel beams made to look like vigas, wood beams found in adobe homes and other Southwestern U.S. construction.

The chandeliers and vigalike ceiling will be above an open, ground-floor bar.

The ground floor also will feature an upscale restaurant with food from various regions of Mexico, Kell said.

The 17th floor, which long ago was a penthouse suite where actress Elizabeth Taylor lived for a time when she was briefly married to Hilton, will be turned into a bar with an outdoor terrace.

A five- or six-story parking garage will be built next to the hotel. It will be built on empty lots Foster bought on the corner of San Antonio Avenue and South El Paso Street, and on a paved parking lot currently in operation next to the Plaza, Kell said.

A floor of the parking garage will likely be used by the Hotel Paso Del Norte at 101 S. El Paso St., Kell said.

The former Camino Real Hotel is undergoing a $70 million renovation by the Meyers Group and Two Sabes LLC. It will become a Marriott Autograph Collection Hotel.

The Plaza will be an independent hotel with no national franchise and will be operated by HHM Hospitality, a Pennsylvania company that operates 125 hotels across the country.

Whether the new hotel will retain the Plaza name has yet to be decided.

The Plaza and Hotel Paso Del Norte are among several hotels being renovated and built in Downtown El Paso.

Kell said Downtown can support all the new hotels and should help bring more conventions to El Paso.

"This will be a boutique hotel. There are different flavors (of hotels) for different people," he said.

Joe Gudenrath, executive director of the El Paso Downtown Management District, who took part in Tuesday's Plaza tour, said the new hotels will bring needed residents into Downtown, even if those residents are short-term visitors.

"This definitely will increase our Downtown population," which will help support other Downtown businesses, he said.

"It's great to see a vacant, dark building brought back to life," he said.

Vic Kolenc may be reached at 546-6421; [email protected]; @vickolenc on Twitter.