The Terre Haute House was a historic hotel in downtown Terre Haute, Indiana, United States. Despite efforts to preserve it, the building was demolished in 2005 and replaced by the Hilton Garden Inn Terre Haute, which opened in 2007.
The Terre Haute House was a Renaissance Revival-style, 10-story building located on the northeast corner of Seventh Street and Wabash Avenue (U.S. Highway 40). It was a high-class accommodation between the 1920s and the 1950s, a time when Terre Haute's well-known illegal gambling operations and other businesses of ill repute brought high rollers to the area.
From Prairie House to Terre Haute House The first Terre Haute House was built by Terre Hautean, Chauncey Rose, who called it "The Prairie House" because it was located "in the prairie", several blocks east of the village. Rose operated the original hotel from 1838 to 1841. When federal funding for continued construction of the National Road dried up in 1840, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, who supervised construction of the highway, departed the community, the hotel was closed. In the meantime, historical information seems to indicate that the hotel was turned into a boarding house.
With the anticipated opening of the Wabash and Erie Canal at Terre Haute in 1849, Rose reopened the hotel that year and renamed it “The Terre Haute House” in 1855. He also added a fourth floor of guest rooms at that time.
By 1866, Rose was tired of the hotel business and considered donating the property for educational purposes. This did not sit well with members of the local business community, so they formed the Terre Haute Hotel Company and purchased the Terre Haute House from Rose.
Two more ownership changes transpired in the 1870s. In late 1888, Charles Baur, brother of Jacob Baur, founder of Liquid Carbonics Manufacturing Company, managed the hotel, after the second Terre Haute Hotel Company acquired it from the estate of William Tuell in March 1888.
Eventually, Crawford Fairbanks purchased the hotel and property and promised to demolish the existing structure and build a new, much grander hotel on the site. It would be left to his heirs to see this promise to completion, following Fairbanks' death in 1924. Although the decision was made to go ahead with the project in 1925, work did not begin until early 1927. Following the demolition of the old hotel, work began on the new hotel in the spring of 1927.
Second Terre Haute House The new Terre Haute House opened on July 2, 1928. Fred & Harry Van Orman, Inc., a Chicago-based hotel management company owned, at the time, by E. L. Wenzel, took over the new hotel's operations and Wenzel himself became the manager.
The country's rich, famous, and infamous were frequent guests. Rumored among them was Al Capone. With a thriving red light district during those years (though modest compared to the activity which had existed in the 1910s and 1920s), Terre Haute had gambling and prostitution operations that were attractive to visitors like Capone. A biography of Benjamin “Scatman” Crothers seems to be the source of the story that Capone stayed in Terre Haute, but this cannot be proven.
It has also been said that bank robber John Dillinger stayed at the Terre Haute House, although some dispute this. Dillinger supposedly had a deal with local police so they would leave him alone, but this, too, cannot be confirmed.
Downtown in decline The vice that for so many years had run rampant in Terre Haute was on the way out by the time Terre Haute businessman and Indianapolis Motor Speedway owner Tony Hulman purchased the hotel along with the Terre Haute House Garage and Terre Haute Opera House in 1959. Hulman, whose fortune had been made in his family's distillery, wholesale grocery and baking powder businesses, radio and TV stations, utility companies, and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, wanted to breathe new life into the old hotel.
When construction started on Interstate 70 along Terre Haute's south side, more and more stores and other businesses found that part of town to be far more accessible and inviting than downtown. More modern hotels and motels sprang up in that area along U.S. 41, including a large Holiday Inn that opened in 1962. With all of this competition, Terre Haute's downtown area, like so many others across the country, spiraled into a rapid decline.
The Terre Haute House was not spared the indignities of this decline. The old hotel lost much of its business to the newer hotels and motels, and when the traveling public stopped coming with their former regularity, the hotel became unprofitable. According to Richard Van Allen, who managed the hotel at the time, Hulman tried to keep the hotel open despite the fact that he lost a great deal of money in doing so. Van Allen told the Tribune-Star in 1997 that, toward the end, Hulman sold food at cost and allowed local civic groups to meet in the hotel for free, just to keep people coming in.
On June 18, 1970, Van Allen gathered the hotel staff in the Prairie Room and informed them that the Terre Haute House would close within two weeks. Exactly 42 years and two days after it opened, the Terre Haute House closed to guests on July 4, 1970.
Even though the hotel closed, several businesses remained in the building following its closure, evidently in hopes that the hotel would eventually reopen. When that didn't happen, the tenants simply went out of business or moved elsewhere. The last holdout, World Wide Travel Service, moved out of the hotel to a location on Ohio Street (one block south of the hotel) in the fall of 1980.
Attempts at revival In the 35 years between the Terre Haute House's closing and the start of demolition, numerous developers advanced plans to either renovate and reopen the hotel or demolish it and redevelop the land. Much to the chagrin of local residents, nothing ever got off the ground, and some residents and, most notably, a number of city officials eventually came to see the dilapidated hotel as the ultimate symbol of downtown Terre Haute's stagnation.
In March 1984, then-Terre Haute mayor P. Pete Chalos threatened to condemn the hotel property in an attempt to force the Hulman family into selling it. This didn't work, but it did seem to spur interest among developers, who began working in earnest to put plans together to restore and reopen the old hotel.
Over the decade that followed Chalos' threat, redevelopment plans were advanced and then withdrawn in what seemed to be a perpetual cycle of hopes raised and then dashed. Perhaps the most serious proposal was offered in the mid-1990s. At Chalos' urging, the Walden Group, led by Texas developer Don Daseke, who had developed an attractive hotel on the campus of Depauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, put together what was by most accounts, a very attractive package that would have returned the Terre Haute House to its original use as a luxury hotel, making it a convention destination under the Radisson banner.
Daseke managed to sign a purchase agreement with the Hulman family for the hotel in the summer of 1995, and Radisson signed on early the next year. All of his plans were contingent upon financing, however. Despite the fact local banks in Terre Haute were not and could not be convinced that it would work, they had reached the point where they had essentially decided to give a green light to the project, fully expecting that Daske would end up filing bankruptcy and, perhaps, the subsequent operator before the operation would stabilize. One board member of one of the biggest banks involved, however, insisted that underwriting requirements be imposed that Daseke would later call “onerous.” Daseke pulled out of the project in January 1997, citing the banks' intractability.
The board member who changed the course of the Daseke project was Greg Gibson, whose family, at the time, owned the only full-service hotel in the downtown area, the Larry Bird's "Boston Connection" (which is now a Days Inn with no connection to Bird). Terre Haute First National Bank had decided, despite some reservations, to fund the Daseke project. When bank board member Gibson learned of the bank's intention, he successfully blocked it to protect his interest in the Boston Connection.
Another group of potential investors, with Daseke on board, then turned to a proposal that would have converted the hotel into senior citizen housing. This, too, fell by the wayside.
Later that year, in an interview with the Tribune-Star for a special series of articles on the Hulman family, Tony George, Tony Hulman's grandson and the face of today's Hulman family empire, damned the Terre Haute House with faint praise while basically reiterating the family's indifference toward the old hotel. “I think architecturally it's significant, historically it's significant and it would be really nice to see it somehow evolve to be part of the downtown again,” he said. “I just don't think that we are in any position to develop it ourselves, given everything else that's going on. If no one develops it, we'll probably demolish it.”
In 2002, following Tony George's pronouncement regarding his general disinterest in the Terre Haute House, John R. Bischoff met with Hulman officials Jeff Belskus, Curt Brighton, and Fred Nation, and convinced them to consider one last effort to renovate the property. Bischoff, along with local attorney C. Joseph Anderson and Charles Faust of Summit Hotel Management formed Haute Maison Development LLC for that purpose. Haute Maison struck a deal with Marriott Corporation. HNTB became the architect of record and F. A. Wilhelm was selected to renovate the structure.
Complicating the effort to fund the project was that Mayor Judy Anderson, in office at the beginning of Haute Maison's effort, was the sister-in-law of Haute Maison partner C. Joseph Anderson. Anderson was already under attack for choosing one of her sons to serve as her administrative assistant and for granting another son a city sidewalk contract. Many political observers believe such decisions significantly contributed to her defeat by Kevin Burke in the May 2003 mayoral primary.
By the time Burke took office, Haute Maison had secured the necessary funding commitments in the form of syndication of Historic Tax Credits, New Markets Tax Credits, and certain state credits. Essentially all funding, including the mortgage funding was to come from out-of-town sources.
Bischoff and Anderson met with Burke, not to obtain any form of city financial support, but to ask him to refrain from seeking to block their effort. In response, Burke later attended an Urban Enterprise Association meeting in which he warned the membership against providing the project $250,000 in assistance it had promised the developers.
Later, a legal representative of the developer's New Market Tax Credit funding source came to town simply to determine that the city was receptive to the development. Burke, through his representative, successfully soured the representative on investment in the city. He had many other cities seeking such investment and willing to contribute their fair share.
Burke successfully blocked all other efforts to renovate the building by convincing the building owners to allow the city to take control and create and publish a request for proposals for the structure. Attorneys for both the building owner and the city drafted the RFP. The RFP specified that no city assistance would be provided and $1,000,000 in assistance, previously promised to prospective developers by the property owner, would now be unavailable. All responses to the RFP were rejected and the project and several million dollars in public assistance and unspecified incentives provided by the property owner were made available to Greg Gibson, who did not present a proposal in response to the RFP.