It has been a spicy couple of months for the Downtown hotel discourse.
First, in January, came a new entry in the More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same File: the existence of a hotel Downtown called The Marc. It came courtesy of, of course, Marcus Corp., which reopened the newer west wing of the Hilton Milwaukee by riffing on the name it had from 1972-95: The Marc Plaza Hotel. (Are you comforted, MKE old heads?)
The new old brand is distinct from its onetime master as a limited-service, boutique-esque property, as one could tell from the The beginning in its name. It’s a lower-end hotel; for example, Marc rooms were 12%-36% cheaper than Hilton rooms on the day of its debut.
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Marcus had closed the portion of the property that became The Marc as part of a $42 million renovation of the Hilton, announced in late 2024. At that time, Marcus also said it was taking the 14-story, Y2K-vintage wing of the hotel out of the Hilton permanently and converting it to another use. (Would anyone have been surprised if it had turned out to be apartments?)
Why remove the wing from the Hilton entirely instead of refreshing the rooms? The Marc’s 175 rooms weren’t as direly in need of a refresh as those in the 98-year-old main building (first built in 1927 as the Hotel Schroeder), but it’s likely they weren’t going to meet the Hilton brand’s standard for long, either.
The room contraction, though, may have seemed odd to anyone even casually following the saga of putting up visitors Downtown. Visit Milwaukee in particular has been pushing for a massive new hotel to serve the gleaming Baird Center, recently refreshed and expanded to be able to host two big conventions simultaneously. Marcus has said the Downtown hotel market is adequately supplied, even with the new convention visitors, and has resisted giving over so many of its rooms at the aging property to events often scheduled years ahead. The hotel picture Downtown is not quite this simple, but Marcus’ December 2024 announcement that it was downsizing the Hilton – attached to the Baird Center by skywalk – had the air of a kid taking his ball and going home.
Then, a few months later, the new use of the Hilton’s leftovers emerged: It would be a hotel after all, albeit a different one: The Marc. And just two weeks after the mid-January opening of The Marc, it became clear that Marcus wasn’t the only one moving forward with its Downtown strategy.
On Jan. 29, the Wisconsin Center District, which operates the Baird Center, dropped a bomb: a study it had commissioned that included the idea of replacing the historic Miller High Life Theatre (on the other side of the Wisconsin Center from the Hilton/Marc) with a 650-room hotel. It was back in the news this week as the price tag (as much as $455 million) and public subsidy of the hotel became public. Perhaps, reports said, it would even be owned by the Wisconsin Center District, which commissioned the study that resulted in the gleaming renderings of a hotel that it has said it wasn’t necessarily pushing for.
There’s much to be decided, of course, but what is known is what has taken shape across Wisconsin Avenue from the convention center: The Marc has 175 rooms, the Hilton now has 554 – still the biggest hotel in the city.
And, if you want to hark back to perhaps a simpler time in the Downtown hotel wars, when Don Nelson was stalking the sidelines over at the brand-new Bradley Center a few blocks away, you can check into The Marc.
