The Citizen Hotel, a 10-room boutique hotel downtown, will serve its last cocktails in the lobby bar on Saturday, May 20.

On Sunday, May 21, the hotel in the former Tucson Citizen office building downtown will close.

The closing comes nearly 15 months to the day that the hotel opened and coincides with Tucson businesses bracing for the annual summer slowdown. That’s when tourism dramatically drops, and the city loses its reliable revenue stream from the loss of University of Arizona students and winter residents.

Sofonias Astatke, founder and managing partner of the hotel’s owner Equilibrium Real Estate Investments, could not be reached Monday to comment on the hotel’s future.

The Citizen Hotel opened in mid-February 2022, a year after Equilibrium and its then partner, Tucson hotel operator Moniqua Lane, invested $2.5 million to renovate the 110-year-old office building at 82 N. Stone Ave., converting the first- and second-floor offices into hotel rooms, adding a bar in the lobby and creating an event space in the 5,000-square-foot basement.

β€œWe knew it would be risky,” Lane, who owns The Downtown Clifton boutique hotel at 485 N. Stone Ave., said of the project.

Equilibrium, the 20-year-old Tucson-based company that primarily focuses on multifamily residential properties, bought out Lane’s stake in the project earlier this year.

The Tucson Citizen Building, built in 1913, was home to the former Tucson Citizen newspaper from 1914 until 1940, when the Citizen and Arizona Daily Star entered into a joint operating agreement that allowed both newspapers to maintain independent and competitive newsrooms while sharing in the costs and revenues of joint printing, distribution and advertising operations.

Over the years, the building housed professional offices, including doctors, dentists, lawyers and radio stations.

Lane and Astatke bought the building in 2018 for $1.45 million. When she announced plans for the hotel in early 2021, Lane said they chose to name it Citizen Hotel as a nod to the newspaper, which at the time that it stopped publishing in 2009 was the oldest newspaper in the state.

The renovations took a year before the hotel opened in early 2022, just as Tucson and the rest of the state was starting to make inroads to recovering from the pandemic losses. Statewide hotel occupancy rates from March 2022 to this March inched up 3.5%, according to data from the Arizona Office of Tourism.

In metro Tucson, hotels in the first quarter of this year (January-March) had an occupancy rate of 73.8%, which was 3.3% higher than last year’s first quarter, the state reported.

Since opening in mid-February 2022, the hotel has hosted weddings and community arts events, from jazz concerts to art exhibits. The bar had garnered a loyal following, with customers giving four- and five-star reviews on Yelp and TripAdvisor about the inventive cocktails, vibe and service.

Tucson Landmarks: The St. Augustine Cathedral is located at 192 S. Stone Ave. and is older than the state of Arizona itself. Founded in 1776, the church has been a landmark for Tucsonans and visitors since. After several renovations, the current cathedral features delicate and historical architecture and colorful stained glass windows. Pascal Albright / Arizona Daily Star

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Contact reporter Cathalena E. Burch at cburch@tucson.com. On Twitter @Starburch