ROCKFORD - Wisconsin-based Gorman & Co. is close to an agreement that would return the city's first skyscraper to downtown prominence as a $50 million hotel and convention center.

As first reported Thursday morning at rrstar.com, a proposed development agreement to renovate the 13-story Ziock building, perhaps better known as the Amerock building, at 416 S. Main St., is expected to go before the Rockford City Council in mid-March.

"I'm feeling very good about it," Rockford Mayor Larry Morrissey said, "but we've had a lot of things to work through. Gorman is an extremely capable firm. They've done a lot of projects of significant magnitude across the country."

If successful, Gorman would turn the building into a 150-room hotel complex with bars, restaurants and as much as 20,000 square feet for conventions, banquets, receptions and trade shows.

Gorman specializes in reusing historic buildings, known in the business as adaptive reuse.

President Gary J. Gorman said his company had done projects in four states and 25 communities, including Milwaukee, where it turned the brew house and mill house at the shuttered Pabst brewery into a 90-room extended-stay hotel, The Brewhouse Inn & Suites.

Reaction on Facebook on Thursday to the proposed renovation ranged from enthusiastic to skeptical, reflecting both the desire for a downtown renaissance and the reality that a hotel-convention center has been a recurring part of an urbanist dreamscape for the past four decades and that it always ends badly.

And this proposal is a historic renovation project, much more complex than simply building new on a green field site.

The Ziock proposal involves state and federal tax credits, which will pay for 45 percent of construction costs. The state tax credit program requires the building to be in use by the end of 2016, so the company hopes to proceed quickly.

The development agreement addresses changes to the traffic flow on Wyman Street and infrastructure improvements needed to bolster the project, the mayor said. Making Chestnut Street more pedestrian-friendly is another priority, and so is turning the railroad bridge over the Rock River south of the Ziock building into a walkway.

But the project linchpin is the Reclaiming First indoor sports complex, a facility that will cost an estimated $13.6 million. The Ingersoll building is across the river from the hotel, which is banking that out-of-town visitors coming downtown for a basketball or volleyball tournament will want to stay nearby.

"We think that (Ingersoll facility) is going to be a big driver of room nights and we have to make it as easy as possible to get back and forth," said Gorman, whose company is based in Oregon, Wis. "That building has a lot of potential."

Within a couple of years Ingersoll is projected to host 30 tournaments a year on the weekends. During the week it would be for community use, said John Groh, president of the Rockford Convention & Visitors Bureau.

Convention space will also be marketable, Groh said.

"When you introduce a new hotel and convention space into the market, it is going to attract association meetings, conferences and trainings that otherwise wouldn't choose Rockford," Groh said.

Groh called the project "catalytic," one that would benefit adjacent businesses, and attract more development from entrepreneurs and other businesses that see potential customers.

But catalyzing that potential takes money, and financing for these kinds of projects is complicated.

For the Pabst renovation in Milwaukee, Gorman tapped into an alternative source of revenue through the EB-5 program. The federal program encourages foreigners to invest $500,000 or $1 million, depending on the location, in new commercial enterprises. Their investment must create 10 jobs in the U.S.

In exchange, investors get a green card.

Gorman said he'll use EB-5 financing for the project here, too.

Great Recession idea

The Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., think tank, said the EB-5 program has spurred regional economic development in both metropolitan and rural areas. Many developers turned to the program after traditional financing dried up during the Great Recession, allowing them to pursue projects through the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.

Many investors in the EB-5 program are Chinese. Morrissey and Gorman traveled together in China in 2011, when the mayor was part of a trade delegation with Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn and the developer was meeting with investment partners, Morrissey said.

In advance of the trip, the mayor said that the "big pitch is finding foreign direct investment."

If the project goes forward, direct foreign investment would play a key role in reviving a decrepit 101-year-old building and, potentially, the area around it.

Four years ago it appeared that the building had run out of potential. It was considered an urban eyesore appeared headed for the wrecking ball. But it was saved by Friends of Ziock, which successfully lobbied the city's Historic Preservation Commission to get the building on the National Historic Register.

The city bought the Ziock and the adjacent Tapco building in 2010, and razed the Tapco two years later.

The remaining structure was built by William Ziock, a knitting company owner, who erected what was then the city's tallest building in 1913.

Convention center added

The Ziock project may become the largest private investment in downtown. The deal is shaping up about a year and a half after Gorman was given exclusive redevelopment rights by the city. Gorman, which redeveloped the Jane Addams public housing complex for the Rockford Housing Authority, began looking at turning the property into a mixed-use facility that included both hotel and market rate residential and commercial space. Gorman said initial studies determined that a hotel alone wouldn't work, so convention center space was added.

Over the past four decades pitches have come for such a facility from consultants, developers, politicians and charlatans, who have found an eager audience seeking the rejuvenation of a central city that emptied after retailers, offices and residents moved to the city's fringes.

This one is different, says architect and downtown proponent Gary Anderson,

"For 40 years there has never been a groundswell like this," said Anderson, who worked on preliminary drawings for Gorman and is a member of Friends of Ziock.

"Having people from out of town come in here is a huge plus, to have the confidence in our community that they can make this happen.

"It's very pivotal."

Brian Leaf: 815-987-1343; bleaf@rrstar.com; @b_leaf