MANITOU SPRINGS - "Save Manitou from the Cliff House," reads the sign outside a Grand Avenue home.

That's not a sentiment you see often in Colorado Springs' neighbor to the west, where the Cliff House at Pikes Peak is the city's most elegant hotel and often considered something of a civic treasure.

Ask Paul York, general manager at the Cliff House, and he'll say his hotel is what needs to be saved.

"The reason we need to do this is the survival of the Cliff House itself," York said.

At issue is a $15 million to $20 million plan to more than double the number of rooms the hotel offers by building "The Cliff House West" around the historic Wheeler House at 36 Park Ave., which is owned by the same company as the Cliff House, but run as a separate hotel. Adding the space, along with a spa, swimming pool and rooftop garden, promises to bring the Cliff House new convention and meeting bookings, with a potential business spillover that could benefit restaurants and merchants throughout the city, proponents of the plan say.

"Once they bring people to town, they're looking to dine and shop in Manitou, so that's a great thing for us," said Dave Symonds, who owns the Craftwood Inn and the Stagecoach Inn in Manitou Springs.

To the folks living behind the Wheeler House on Grand Avenue, however, the expansion threatens to turn their beloved street into a back alley, shadowed by the hotel expansion. They fear for their views, worry about delivery truck traffic and wonder what it will mean for the spirit of the neighborhood.

"It looks an awful lot like the Woodland Park Wal-Mart," Grand Avenue resident Julie Wolfe said of the expansion's design. "They're building this big, monsterlooking thing. I don't feel like they're attempting to work with the community to make it something aesthetically pleasing."

Grand Avenue is a gem, Wolfe said, lined with historic houses, filled with families, and host to amazing views of the mountains surrounding the city.

"It's one of the most historic, beautiful streets in our little city," she said.

Wolfe's own view isn't in danger - she lives just west of the expansion - but Dennis McEnnerney lives across the street from the project, in a home once owned by former owners of the Cliff House. Seeing the plans made him concerned and, when the Cliff House placed poles at the site in May indicating the roof height for the expansion, his heart sank.

"It's a 288-foot-long wall they're planning," McEnnerney said. "It would transform the whole neighborhood."

The poles, York said, were placed in the wrong spots and ended up being four feet too high. New poles better represent the real roofline for the project. Of course, that roofline is sort of a moving target. Plans for the Wheeler House expansion have been changed five times to reflect concerns from the community and the city planning and historic preservation committees.

The Manitou Springs planning commission will consider the latest plans on July 30, followed by the city's historic preservation committee on Aug. 6 and then the City Council will have its say later in August. If a plan is approved, York said construction will likely begin in October with the new expansion up and running by the fall of 2009.
York said if the project gets any smaller, it won't make financial sense to go forward.
"We already have guest rooms that will be facing walls on Grand Avenue; those are going to be very hard to sell," he said of the plans. "When you start removing rooms, that's where it ends."

The Cliff House, York said, has been profitable only two years (2004 and 2005) since it reopened as a hotel in 1999. At 55 rooms, it's too small for the vast majority of meetings, and it lacks facilities families want - namely a swimming pool. The expansion would solve those problems, adding 79 rooms, 170 parking spaces, a pool, a ballroom, meeting space and a mineral springs hot tub.

"A 55-room hotel is not equipped to sell meeting groups of any significance," York said. "We have a real tough time selling weeknights."

Pam Sherfesee, vice president for sales at Experience Colorado Springs at Pikes Peak, the regional convention and visitors bureau, confirmed that the expansion would make the Cliff House much more viable for small to midsize meetings.

"Right now, they're mostly the romantic weekends and the wedding market," she said. "It's the perfect venue for that. (With the expansion,) now you're able to jump out there and there are thousands of meetings that are 150 to 200 people."

But at what cost to the neighborhood? McEnnerney asks. He'd like to see the project go forward, but on a smaller scale.

"It's very large; it fills the entire footprint of the lot leaving a kind of a courtyard in the middle," he said of the expansion. "They've done a lot of little things that have, in fact, improved the project from the initial version, but they haven't really addressed the main problems."

Not all Grand Avenue residents oppose the expansion. The existing Wheeler House and a somewhat downscale set of cottages built around it aren't really a community asset, said Andy Arneson, a resident on Grand Avenue. Replacing those with an upscale hotel would be a trade up, he said.

"Architecturally, I think it's beautiful," Arneson said of the plans for the expansion. "None of these things for me is a deal killer. I think people are kind of being shortsighted."

In 2006, the hotel's previous owners proposed building a 50-room hotel expansion and 15 luxury townhouses around the Wheeler House - a plan that also drew vocal neighborhood opposition. When the Cliff House was sold later that year, several potential buyers were interested in turning it into condos and timeshares, York said, before Texas-based 1859 Historic Hotels Ltd. bought the property based on the expansion. If the Cliff House West fails, York warned, the existing Cliff House may follow it. And what then? If it became condos, the city would lose out on room and sales tax, and local businesses would be hurt, he said.

"We're doing everything in our power to accommodate the residents on Grand Avenue, really to a point where we may be hurting ourselves from a business standpoint," York said. "We hope their concerns won't take Manitou Springs hostage."

HOUSE HISTORY CLIFF HOUSE HISTORY

Built in 1874 as a stagecoach stop, the Cliff House was upgraded several times and was a luxury hotel until the 1950s, when it became military housing and then an apartment complex. Jim Morley bought the hotel in 1981, converting it into an apartment building. It was badly burned in a fire a few months later, leaving it uninhabitable. It wasn't until 1997 that Morley secured $9 million in financing to turn it into a boutique hotel, a project that was completed in 1999. The Cliff House was sold to 1859 Historic Hotels Ltd., a subsidiary of Gal-Tex Hotel Corp., in 2006. The hotel and its dining room have each earned AAA's four-diamond rating seven times.

WHEELER HOUSE HISTORY

Built in 1890 by New York millionaire Jerome B. Wheeler as a bowling alley and a shooting range for his estate, the Wheeler House has spent most of its history as apartments and hotel rooms. It was so decrepit by the 1980s that the city threatened it with condemnation. Penny Bever bought the Wheeler House from Jim Morley in 1988 and renovated the building. Bever sold it back to Morley in 2006 in a package deal that ended with both the Wheeler House and the Cliff House being sold to 1859 Historic Hotels.