“I don’t know if we ever had a plan. It all just sort of evolved.”
ichar d and s hana never set out to get into the hospitality business. Their purchase of the hotel was almost accidental. A Phoenix native, Richard had become a criminal-defense lawyer in Tucson—he successfully argued a civil-rights case in the front of the U.S. Supreme Court in the late ’70s—while Shana had moved out west from New York and spent a few years living on Mount Lemmon before getting a degree at the University of Arizona and landing a gig working to get drug addicts into treatment. They met on a blind date. When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, the couple decided it was time to leave the country for a while. With a 2-year-old daughter and a second kid on the way, they struck out to see what the other side of the globe had to offer and landed in New Zealand. It turned out that it didn’t offer enough. By 1984, the Oserans were back in Tucson. Richard went back to practicing law, but in the mid-’80s, many people were getting rich off the real-estate boom. A few friends approached him about teaming
up to buy the Hotel Congress. He recalls visiting the property and noting a group of elderly residents sitting in the lobby, watching an old console TV. “It impressed me as a clean place,” Richard remembers. “It wasn’t seedy. Maybe a little tired.” Before the deal was consummated in 1985, his fellow investors found themselves in a financial jam, so Richard ended up buying the place himself. And then he had to figure out what to do with it. “I don’t know if we ever had a plan,” Richard says. “It all just sort of evolved.” Downtown Tucson was a much different place 30 years ago. Retail stores had been leaving downtown behind for decades, and bars like the Manhattan and the Esquire catered to a seedier clientele. “When we came down here they were finding bodies in the alcove of the [then-shuttered] Rialto,” Richard remembers. Shana remembers chasing drug dealers away from the sidewalks around the hotel. “I went out there and said that if anyone’s going to be doing any business on this corner, it’s going to be me,” she says.
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