CHICKASHA — A construction crew has been renovating the front of the Savoy Hotel building and installing pipes beneath the flooring.
The city’s Historic Preservation Commission on June 13 approved façade designs for windows and doors in the downtown building that were proposed by owner Chet Hitt, a California businessman who six months ago announced plans to invest perhaps $5 million in Old Town Chickasha.
Hitt bought the formerly vacant 121-year-old hotel and is converting it into the “Savoy 1902 BBQ and Deli.”
The exterior doors will be “reskinned” or replaced entirely, and the handles will feature Hitt’s signature “Town’s End” logo.
A construction crew has built quarter-inch-thick steel frames to hold large new windows that will be facing Chickasha Avenue. The original smaller windows in the upper section of the exterior wall will remain as is.
Particle board material laced with asbestos was removed from the ceiling and will be replaced with copper tin tiles.
Most of the original flooring was removed and replaced with plywood sheets; permanent hardwood flooring will be overlain later. “That will be installed last, because we don’t want to scratch it,” Hitt explained.
Workmen, including Hitt’s brother, Chuck, have installed water lines beneath the flooring to the kitchen, the bar and restrooms. “I’m working with an architect” on those three areas, Hitt told Southwest Ledger.
He said he was unable to find the bar he envisioned for the Savoy. However, “I found a company in Chickasha that does high-end work throughout the country. He can build anything. So I sent him the plans for what I want built.” The new bar will be 30 feet wide by 11 to 12 feet tall, Hitt said, and “will be the major feature of my restaurant.”
The Savoy “was a hotel at one time, an eatery at one time, and I was told it was a brothel at one time,” Hitt said. “It’s got so much character that I don’t need to do a whole lot to make it look good,” he said in a video he posted on Facebook.
When the Savoy restoration project is completed, the dining area and bar will accommodate 80 to 100 patrons, Hitt estimated.
He said he hopes to have the Savoy renovation finished by the end of this year.
Hitt chatted at length last Thursday with John Hinds, who lives in Tulsa but was reared in Chickasha. Hinds said that “at one time” his great-grandfather owned the Savoy, “in 1913 for sure.”
Ground floor of Mill Building remodeled
Hitt also bought and is remodeling the nearby Mill Building, which had been vacant for years. The building houses 3,802 square feet of space: 1,901 square feet on each of its two floors.
In less than a week Hitt and a construction crew he brought from California remodeled the ground floor of the building. “We’ve removed the old carpet on the second floor, and we’re going to repaint, replace light fixtures and work on the floor,” he said. He plans to establish his Chickasha business office on the second floor of the Mill Building.
During a presentation to the City Council last December, Hitt said his Town’s End Company will establish a TE Coffee House in the Mill Building.
The coffeehouse will feature “our special blend of roasted coffees, along with its own private label of coffee beans” for public sale. Other retail items will include clothing, soaps and miscellaneous items bearing the Town’s End and TE Coffee House brand. The Mill Building also will house an information center “showcasing our projects.”
The actual age of the previously abandoned Mill Building is unknown, but it is believed to have been constructed about 80 years ago.
Stillhouse & Grill in plans for project
Hitt’s development plans also include construction of a 10,000 square-foot Stillhouse & Grill.
The central feature will be a copper still that produces half a million to a million bottles of spirits per year, he said, and “will be the anchor of the Town’s End project.” The distillery alone will cost $1 million, he said during his presentation to the City Council in December.
“Basically, I’m in the restaurant and distilling business,” Hitt told the Ledger.
“I cure my own pastrami and bacon, and will smoke turkeys and chickens,” he said. “I do as much as I can in-house.”
The distillery and restaurant will be built behind the Mill Building, he said.
Hitt also bought the abandoned grain elevator downtown, which he intends to use as an advertising “billboard” displaying large “Welcome to Old Town Chickasha” neon signs.
He said he plans to build rickhouses in the vicinity of the grain elevator to house barrels of whiskeys and bourbons “for the aging process.” He said he envisions storage for approximately 25,000 barrels of spirits in the rickhouses.
Vehicles with logo are ‘part of my branding’
Hitt returned to Chickasha on June 10 and flew back to California on June 30.
When he arrived last month he brought with him another vehicle in his fleet: a restored 1938 Ford COE truck on which he hauls wooden barrels. The original motor has been replaced with a 454 cubic-inch Chevy engine.
In an earlier trip Hitt brought a 1917 Ford open-cab hearse to Chickasha. “We’re trying to get it up and running” in time to carry the Grinch during the Christmas parade, he said.
During his latest trip he brought an 1898 hearse “that I used to bury Roy Rogers. I also buried his wife, Dale Evans.” Their graves are in the Sunset Hills Memorial Park and Mortuary in Apple Valley, California.
Rogers and Evans teamed up to produce Westerns and a popular TV series that was broadcast for six seasons in the 1950s. The Double R Brand Ranch they co-owned was built in 1950 along the Mojave River off old Route 66 just north of Apple Valley.
Hitt became a partner in a mortuary company in 1997, and within three years they bought four more funeral homes in the High Desert of California. He later sold his Sunset Hills Family of Mortuaries.
He previously transported to Chickasha a restored 1940 panel wagon he uses for promotions and as a delivery vehicle.
He also has a semi that pulls a 53-foot trailer which originally hauled NASCAR racers until Hitt bought and renovated it to haul his horses. The trailer accommodates his team of “big, black Percheron draft horses” and the hitch wagon they pull, along with their harnesses. The Percheron is a breed of draft horse that originated in the Huisne River Valley in western France. Hitt said he plans to build stables in Chickasha for his horses, which weigh 1,800 to 2,100 pounds each.
The panel wagon, the semi-trailer truck, the hitch wagon and the delivery truck all are painted in canary yellow and black along with Hitt’s “Town’s End” logo. They are “part of my branding,” he said.
So is his 65-passenger bus bearing a “Welcome to Old Town Chickasha” greeting on the sides and the rear. The vehicle serves two functions, Hitt said: “to transport visitors from the Grady County Fairgrounds to Old Town Chickasha, and for its advertising and marketing potential.”
Town’s End is a reference to his commercial operation in Apple Valley. “My business there is at the east end of the original business district,” he said.
Return to Oklahoma for class reunion benefits Chickasha
Hitt was born and reared in California, but his family moved to Oklahoma for a time when he was a teenager. After graduating from high school in Anadarko in 1982 he returned to California. Hitt has spent most of his life in Apple Valley, which is approximately 93 miles northeast of Los Angeles at the southern edge of the Mojave Desert.
A drive through Chickasha last year while in Oklahoma for his 40th high-school reunion at Anadarko sparked his ideas for an investment of up to $5 million in the vicinity of the leg lamp statue.