Happy fields

Every downtown has a building no one wants.

You know the kind: It sticks out like a sore thumb, blighting the downtown neighborhood around it. It's the kind of building that's too expensive to tear down and too costly to renovate, so it just sits there vacant for years. Mayors hate it, developers avoid it and brokers joke about it. Occasionally, a brave entrepreneur tries to put a deal together to salvage it.

The latest redevelopment effort concerns the former Ambassador Hotel, a vacant 24-story tower of hideous pinkish hue at the gateway to downtown Fort Myers. It is so big that the developers who opened it in 1986 lost it in foreclosure a few years later because it was a financial disaster.