Tucson's Manning House closing as event center, goes up for sale

"It's a competitive business, and we didn't make it," said CEO Colleen Concannon, who founded the events business at the 1907 "Snob Hollow" home almost 16 years ago. "Summer is always difficult, but this one is worst of all."

Between the construction of newer meeting rooms, including at the casinos, downtown construction and the sizzling season slowdown, Concannon decided over the past two weeks it was time to move on.

The Concannon family, which owns the downtown property at 450 W. Paseo Redondo, is offering it for $67 a square foot. That amounts to $2.48 million for a 37,000-square-foot building on 5.2 acres.

"It's a bargain," Concannon said. "It's like giving it away."

The building's period décor and equipment will be sold at a series of yard sales at the property. The sales are slated for Fridays and Saturdays from 7 a.m. until noon beginning July 20 and lasting until everything is gone.

Among the pieces for sale are a couch from the historic Blenman family home, bookcases, desks, banquet tables, German Eschenbach china and Italian Sambonet silverware, stamped, in the European style, on the front.

Concannon started her business at the home because she was attracted to the history, and it's the period ambience she created that kept Tucsonans coming back.

"I thought it was lovely," said Marcie Fritz-Reichenbacher, development director of Therapeutic Riding of Tucson, as she left a Tucson Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce event at the house Tuesday. "That's too bad (it's closing). It's a beautiful facility."

Tom McGovern, principal and vice president of the engineering firm Psomas, said he has witnessed everything from a wedding to a wake in the 30 or so years he's been going there. "This place serves everyone," he said.

Tiane Kennedy, public relations director of Gap Ministries Inc. who was also attending the Chamber luncheon, hopes that the property remains accessible to the public.

"I hope someone buys it and can afford to maintain it," she said. "Maybe it could be a museum."

The property has already been through several transformations. It was built in 1907 as a 12,000-square-foot mansion on 10 acres in a neighborhood filled with Tucson's most influential families, now referred to as El Presidio.

After the Manning family, for whom architect Henry Trost built the house, moved out in 1949, the Benevolent Protective Order of Elks took over. It added 20,000 square feet, enclosed the atrium and sealed in the courtyard to serve as a ballroom.

In 1979, during a downtown redevelopment phase, the city bought the building, then sold it a year later to a company that converted it into commercial offices. The remodel helped to preserve the building, but dramatically changed the indoor space.

Those changes were undone when the Concannon family purchased the mansion in 1997.

Did you know?

Architect Henry Trost designed the Manning House in 1907 for Levi Howell Manning, who over his lifetime worked as a newspaper reporter, general manager of the Tucson Ice and Electric Company, surveyor-general for the Territory of Arizona, mayor, then developer of the Santa Rita Hotel and promoter of the first streetcar in Tucson.

Trost also designed the Steinfeld Mansion, the Ronstadt House and the Owl's Club, but the Manning House was one of his most ambitious projects, which attempted to invent an architectural style unique to the desert Southwest.

The style is a hybrid of Spanish Colonial, Italian Renaissance and Prairie Style architecture. It was described by Tucson Citizen architecture critic Lawrence Cheek in 1984 as "a grand and glorious turkey, a monster mansion composed of design doodads pirated from four or five centuries and possibly a farm animal or two."

The Manning family lived there until 1949, when downtown urbanization prompted them to move to their ranch, the Canoa, 30 miles south of Tucson.

Source: Jonathan Mabry, Tucson's historic preservation officer

Contact reporter Carli Brosseau at cbrosseau@azstarnet.com or 573-4197.