In the face of a shaky downtown Milwaukee hotel market in recent years, Marcus Corp. has stood steady.

The Milwaukee-based lodging and movie theater operator recently completed its most extensive renovation project in company history, investing $42 million to revitalize its historic Hilton Milwaukee hotel at 509 W. Wisconsin Ave. The guest rooms, event spaces and two-story lobby area in the hotel’s original footprint have all been upgraded with modern amenities and fresh design accents that honor the building’s original 1920s Art Deco architecture style.

As one of two hotels connected to downtown Milwaukee’s convention center, the Hilton’s renovation piggybacked off the $456 million expansion of the Baird Center, completed in May 2024 to double its size and, in turn, draw more large-scale conventions to Milwaukee.

“The convention center is beautiful. We built (the Hilton redesign) to complement what’s there. And we’re very pleased with how it turned out,” said Marcus Corp. CEO Greg Marcus in a recent interview with BizTimes. “When people come here, it’s easily the nicest hotel attached to our convention center right now.”

Since 2019, Marcus Corp. has invested $160 million in its Wisconsin hotel properties, including the transformation of the Saint Kate and, more recently, upgrades to The Pfister Hotel and Grand Geneva Resort & Spa.

The Hilton project garnered plenty of local media attention when it was announced in late 2024, in part because of an unexpected caveat: the 175 rooms in the property’s west tower – added to the building in 2000 – would not be renovated and instead would be taken offline, reducing total room count at the Hilton Milwaukee from 729 to 554.

What would become of the 14-story tower remained unclear up until September, when Marcus announced plans to repurpose that portion of the property as an independent, limited-service hotel, called The Marc, expected to open in January.

For its role in shaping Milwaukee’s hospitality sector through continued reinvestments in downtown properties, Marcus Corp. is the BizTimes Milwaukee 2025 Best in Business Family-Owned Business of the Year.

It should be noted that the BizTimes editorial team, in recognizing Marcus under this category, opted for a generous interpretation of the term “family owned.” The company went public in 1972 and has been traded on the New York Stock Exchange since 1993. But considering the Marcus family owns roughly 26% of the company’s outstanding shares, comprising its largest shareholder group, and holds four of 13 board seats, “family controlled” might be a more accurate descriptor.

Originally, Marcus’ decision to eliminate 175 rooms from the city’s largest hotel property seemed surprising given the anticipation of increased demand for hotel rooms following the Baird Center expansion.

Greg Marcus at the time pointed to a struggling post-pandemic downtown hotel market – one that has seen the bankruptcies or foreclosures of four different properties since 2022 – and the threat of increased competition as the possibility of a larger convention hotel (with 500 or 1,000 rooms) remains in question. That kind of project would require some form of taxpayer subsidy from the city, which, Greg Marcus claims, if led by a competitor, would put his business at an unfair advantage. He’s also of the mind that no new hotel rooms should be added to downtown Milwaukee’s supply until occupancy rates and RevPAR (revenue per available room) recover.

Those factors are still at play a year later, but instead of letting 175 rooms sit empty – or, worse, selling the Hilton’s west tower to another user – re-opening it as The Marc will allow Marcus to continue making money off of those rooms, just now under a separate brand.

The move also keeps the Hilton site available to one day be expanded into the 1,000-room hotel some leaders believe the city needs. That approach, says Marcus, would cost much less than building an entirely new convention hotel.

“Thinking about the Hilton, maybe we don’t need a 1,000-room hotel right now, but if we take those rooms out, it’ll never be,” said Marcus. “…  The idea of preserving your optionality seems like a very smart one to us.”

But an expansion of the Hilton – or any additional investment in that property – will not be possible without public funding, said Marcus.

“The only way we can do it now is with a subsidy,” he said. “So many hotels have been subsidized, and the threat of future subsidy, we’ve reached the limit of our ability to make private investment and now it would need to be a public-private partnership.”