About us
Moniqua, a local business owner and Tucson native, had dreams of remaking the southern Arizona hospitality landscape in a way that felt true to Tucson.
In 2015 Moniqua Lane opened The Downtown Clifton, a boutique hotel that has become quickly beloved for its Southwest charm and vintage flair. Eventually expanded its 10 rooms to 30 and added the on-site restaurant Red Light Lounge.
That purchase helped set into motion a chain of events for Lane and her community, from the expansion of The Clifton to the opening of The Citizen Hotel to the reveal of Tanzillo Construction, her own construction company.
Moniqua’s mission is to authentically connect people to place, and her particular place is Southern Arizona. Moniqua loves Tucson, whole-heartedly and genuinely, and when guests stay with her, she wants them to be caught up in that love such that they want to come back again to visit Tucson.
More than 100 years ago, the Tucson Citizen building housed the area’s first newspaper press; today, the historic outpost is now home to The Citizen Hotel, the 10-room boutique wine hotel.
Building history
At some point in the 1960s, the yellow fired brick, (of which visible examples can be found at the Old Pueblo Club across the street and to the south and the stately Hotel Congress on Congress) was covered by white stucco, but many of the original construction and architectural details peek out and reveal themselves throughout the hotel and cellar. The newspaper called the building home only a few brief times over the years as it grew and changed its name to the Tucson Citizen Newspaper (giving the building and the hotel its name), and many other offices, from dentists to radio stations to attorneys to health care professionals inhabited the modest, but sound offices. The Tucson Citizen was the oldest continuously published newspaper in Arizona at the time it ceased publication in 2009, but its spirit lives on in the halls of the Citizen Hotel Tucson.
In 1913, the Tucson area had been inhabited for over 4,000 years; the city of Tucson had been founded for almost 250 years; the state of Arizona was barely a year old; and 43 years after its founding on October 15, 1870, the Arizona Citizen completed construction of its newspaper press at the corner of Stone and Broadway on the site of a former Sunday School. As was standard building practice then, basalt rock quarried from the base of sentinel peak to the west was moved downtown to form the building’s foundation, Douglas fir timber was hauled down from the heights of Mount Lemmon in the Santa Catalina mountains to the north to be used as supporting beams and columns. The building faced its five grand arches, one entrance and four windows, onto Stone–which was the heart of the business district then.
