GREENSBORO, N.C. -- If you've driven by the Greensboro Grasshoppers stadium downtown over the past several months, you've probably seen the construction right across the street start to take shape.
The Carroll at Bellemeade hotel is expected to be finished in late 2017 or early 2018. The apartments will finish up soon after.
"The apartments will be right on the heels of the hotel," explains Roy Carroll of The Carroll Companies, who is backing the $65 million project. "The hotel is a little further ahead by a couple months."
The plan is to have the Hyatt Place hotel right at the corner of Bellemeade and Eugene Streets. Carroll says it will have 110 rooms and a 3,500 ft. convention space for weddings and conventions. The apartments extend down Eugene Street. There will be 300 apartments with a roof deck, a rooftop pool and a view of First National Bank Field.
"We have quite a list of people that have already contacted us about making reservations in the apartments so we've been really please with the amount of interest we've had so far," Carroll tells.
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The location near the ball park is strategic. Zack Matheny, President and CEO of Downtown Greensboro, Inc., told says the ball park is an economic driver and the city has seen millions of dollars worth of development around it.
"Oh, it's flourished," Matheny tells WFMY News 2 in an interview last week. "To have the ball park downtown. To have that center, that anchor. It widens our downtown."
This will be the first hotel built in downtown Greensboro in more than 30 years and Carroll says the timing is right.
"When I call it the tumbleweed stage of our downtown, there wasn't anything going on," explains. "We didn't have the ball park, didn't have Center City Park so we bought up a small piece of property and just kept adding to that over the years."
There's also a plan in the works to add some retail kiosks at the ground level outside the new hotel and apartments. Carroll says he hopes to bring in vendors like floral shops or bakeries and wants people to be able to easily access the kiosks without having to necessarily find parking downtown.