Developer Wants to Reopen Shenango Inn as Luxury Hotel

SHARON, Pa. – A New York-based boutique hotel developer has plans to return the former Shenango Inn to its former glory and reopen it.

Michael Yanko of The Yanko Group purchased the property for approximately a half-million dollars last month.

He plans to spend about another $5 million to renovate the property at 1330 Kimberly Road, including reopening the inn’s once-popular Golden Lion restaurant under the same name.
The plan is now awaiting action from city council.

Yanko, who introduced his project at a council meeting earlier this month, says the hotel would be a place “where business deals could happen” but also a center for fun. “The guests would be 25% corporate, 60% leisure and 15% business,” he said.

The hotel would be similar to The Hotel Nyack in Nyack, N.Y., which Yanko’s group refurbished and opened as a luxury brand in 2016. The property is now branded as Hotel Nyack by Hyatt Hotels.

The Shenango property would feature fine accommodations with an emphasis on cleanliness and will utilize the Jurny app that allows guests to handle all transactions without person-to-person contact, according to Yanko. Jurny is a hospitality tech company based in Los Angeles.

A theme of the Shenango property will be wellness, Yanko said.

“It will be very elegant with a component of warmness,” Yanko said. “It will be clean and safe. Rooms will be made sterile [after each guest leaves].”

Guests will be able to exercise in their own rooms and will be treated to in-room aromatherapy, purified water and maximum cleanliness of “anything that touches the skin,” Yanko said

All furniture will be purchased from U.S. manufacturers, he said.

The restaurant will have a club element. “Locals can be members and enjoy the facilities without staying in the rooms,” he said. Yanko said he plans to seek partnerships with area facilities such as golf courses.

The hotel-restaurant would have a banquet facility that could be rented for weddings and events, and meeting rooms, and would employ up to 65, Yanko said.

According to its website, The Yanko Group is “a boutique luxury lifestyle company with vested interests in real estate development, technology and wellness.”

The four-story Shenango Inn, which is situated in a quiet residential neighborhood two blocks north of East State Street, opened in 1950 and operated as a high-end hotel and restaurant into the 1980s.

With the construction of an addition in the 1950s, the hotel had more than 90 rooms. In 1960, then-Sen. John F. Kennedy spent the night there when he was in Sharon for a fundraiser.

The Shenango Inn’s fortunes began to fade in the 1970s.

The late James E. Winner and his wife, Donna, bought it in 1979 and operated it. The Winners sold it in the late 1980s, after which it was transformed into a personal-care home.

The building has been vacant for the past three years.

Pictured at top: The former Shenango Inn in Sharon, Pa., would be given a thorough renovation under a proposal from a developer.

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