Laid-Off Staffers Say They've Been Royally Screwed by Company Operating the Brown Palace

For more than a century, the Brown Palace epitomized elegance and excellence in Denver. But the landmark hotel has been on a downward slide in recent years. And that thud you just heard? The Brown is cutting its longtime doormen and bell staff and contracting with an out-of-state valet company instead.

But then, the Brown Palace is now managed by an out-of-state, third-party operator. On March 1, HEI Hotels & Resorts notified the bell staff that it would be laying off all ten employees in those positions on March 15 and replacing them with valets.

The about-to-be-booted employees say that HEI explained the layoffs as cost-saving measures necessitated by poor economic conditions in downtown Denver. HEI is not offering severance pay.

Crescent Real Estate, a Dallas-based company, owns the Brown Palace and contracts with Connecticut-based HEI to operate the hotel. Neither Crescent, HEI or the Brown Palace have responded to requests for comment.

After the layoffs, Chicago-based SP Plus, a corporate valet company, will supply the hotel with valet drivers to help guests when they arrive; there will be no more doormen or bellmen. Among the ten staffers losing their jobs, six primarily worked as doormen while four were bellmen, but those roles overlap at times. Most have worked at the Brown Palace for more than a decade, and one has been there for more than forty years.

Their combined 140 years of experience outnumbered the 132-year-old Brown's years in business, notes concierge Adrian Kley, who previously worked as a bellman. Being a bellman at the Brown Palace "was an incredible job," says Kley, "The people who were already on the staff, I can wax lyrical about every single one of these guys."

"We're the first people you see when you drive up," says a doorman who asked to remain anonymous. "We make sure you get everything unloaded, get your car situated and just try to start the process on the right foot. We're also a downtown map."

While doormen traditionally help guests outside the hotel, bellmen work with guests once they're inside the Brown. But they're all knowledgable about both the hotel and Denver, and have become familiar faces to many guests.

"We've built up a rapport with dozens and dozens of people who live here in Denver and come to the hotel frequently," the doorman says. "Many of them were saddened and angered when they found out they wouldn't be seeing us again."

The doorman says he felt "calm and acceptance" when he was told of the layoffs, but in the days since, he's become angry at Crescent Real Estate, in particular. "HEI is just the evil you know," he says. "Crescent is the company that owns the hotel and makes HEI make these calls."
Kley, who's worked as a bellman at the Brown for just over two years, says the layoffs "came out of nowhere" and were done disrespectfully.

"Either more notice or some sort of severance would have been nice," says the doorman."Or at least ethical."

"There's a lot of shock and disbelief," another employee says. "We all suspected something, even that they were going to eliminate the door position, and the valet was going to take that over. That's happened at many hotels all over the country and certainly here in Denver."

"It was discourteous, to put it mildly, and offensive, to put it strongly," Kley says. "How cheaply everyone was discarded, these people who had spent so much of their lives on the institution. It was pretty shocking."

The bell staff was "a real seasoned group," says another employee who asked to remain anonymous. "Just the door position there has been filled by iconic individuals. One has had ailments, he's struggling, he's in his seventies, and the other guys are all fifteen to twenty years that they've been there."

A few concierge staffers are leaving the hotel in solidarity with the bell staff. The director of rooms was also laid off. One member of the bell staff still has a part-time job with the Brown Palace, but otherwise, fourteen people will leave the Brown effective March 15.
HEI encouraged the laid-off staffers to apply for a job with SP Plus, which might allow them to return to the Brown as valets. In the process, though, they'd lose their seniority and benefits they enjoyed at the hotel; the jobs would also pay less.

Kley says that many of his co-workers wouldn't be able to apply for the SP Plus jobs because some are in their sixties and can't keep up with the physical demands of being a valet; others don't have driver's licenses. He calls the option "lip service from HEI."

Dumping the beloved bell staffers is just the latest move in a "process of taking a once-luxury property and turning it into what we call the Holiday Inn East," says one employee, referring to the Holiday Inn that's attached to the Brown by a sky bridge. "We're turning our hotel into the Holiday Inn."

"They're not respecting the institution of the Brown Palace," another employee says.

A third describes the Brown as "an icon, emblematic of the hospitality scene in Denver."

The Brown Palace is the second-oldest surviving hotel in Denver. It opened in 1892 after four years of construction on a plot of land where prominent developer Henry Brown used to graze his cattle; his house was on the other side of Broadway.

Brown hired architect Frank Edbrooke, who'd designed the Oxford Hotel, which opened in 1890 near Union Station, to complete the Brown on the other side of downtown, at 321 17th Street. With nine stories, it was the tallest building in Denver when it opened in 1892.

The Silver Panic of 1893 sent the country into an economic tailspin the next year, and in 1900, Brown sold his palace to millionaire Winfield Stratton. Stratton died a couple of years later and passed the title to a charitable home.
German immigrant and investor Charles Boettcher bought the hotel in 1922. The Boettcher family owned the hotel until 1963, when the title passed to the Boettcher Foundation. In 1980, it was sold to a group of mostly local investors involved with a company called Associated Inns & Restaurants Company of America.

Through all the changes in ownership, the Brown continued hosting high-end guests, including every president from Teddy Roosevelt in 1905 to Bill Clinton — with the exception of Calvin Coolidge. Dwight Eisenhower has a suite in his name. So do the Beatles, who stayed there before their landmark 1964 show at Red Rocks.

In 2018, Crescent Real Estate bought the Brown Palace for $125 million and appointed HEI Hotels & Resorts to run the iconic hotel.

According to employees, once HEI was put in charge, it ran the Brown Palace with a close eye on productivity and soon began cutting positions that didn't boost revenues.

"Their philosophy was slash and burn," says one. "They squeezed the blood out of the beet. It was very apparent from the get-go that they wanted to really suck every penny out of the hotel and not put much into it."

While HEI and Crescent did put some money into renovations, purists worried that they were removing much of the historic decor that had made the Brown so iconic. One Westword writer compared the new tables in the Ship Tavern, which the Boettcher family had opened shortly after Prohibition, to those at Denny's.

In 2020, HEI closed the Brown Palace for the first time in 128 years because of the pandemic, though it could have remained open as an essential service. "Because they didn't want to pay the money to keep it open, they shut it down," an employee says. "It had been open every single day for 128 years."

The Brown closed again around Thanksgiving weekend in 2022, because of a fire in the chimney caused by deferred maintenance. A few weeks later, the hotel's pipes burst, flooding the hotel's Ellyngton's restaurant and forcing it to close for more than a year.

The changes at the hotel were reflected in a decline in ratings. For 61 years, it was a Mobil Four-Star hotel. After one year under HEI, it lost that distinction and has never gotten its stars back. The Brown's Tripadvisor ratings have also declined.

"I can't imagine there being a lower point in its history," says one employee who's hosted tours at the Brown. Even "during the Great Depression and WWII, they kept it running."       

"When they bought it, I was concerned that they didn't take it seriously as the landmark that it is," he concludes. "And I was right. They were just looking at it as an investment property."