Terre Haute House

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.

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.[1] 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 hotel of a much grander scale on the site. It would be left to his heirs, however, to see this promise through 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 Terre Haute House in the spring of 1927. It 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.

During the old hotel's long existence and the new hotel's early years, the country's rich, famous, and infamous were frequent guests. Rumored to be among the infamous to take advantage of the city's finest in hotels 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.

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.

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 the fact 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.

When Kevin Burke was elected mayor of Terre Haute in 2003, he promised to decide the issue once and for all — Burke's campaign platform had included tearing down the Terre Haute House from the early days of his mayoral run. Once elected, Burke's administration obtained an option to purchase the property from the Hulman family in October 2004.

In January 2005, the city's Department of Redevelopment put out a request for proposals for rehabilitating the old hotel and other historic buildings on the property or redeveloping the site. On May 25, 2005, the committee overseeing the process announced that none of the four rehab proposals met the city's stated financial criteria and thus the project was back at square one once again. The city's purchase option expired the following month, leaving the hotel's future once again in limbo.

The hotel's location in sleepy downtown Terre Haute, coupled with the deterioration of the old building, gave the local government and business community pause when considering proposals to restore the landmark hotel. As restoration cost estimates continued to climb over the years, the willingness of the Terre Haute House's owners (the Hulman family) to work with would-be restorers faded.

And while its façade was beginning to crumble, the structure of the Terre Haute House itself seems to have been very sound. The concrete and steel superstructure would have lent themselves well to restoration and upgrading, but with many interior surfaces damaged by decades of water infiltration, any such effort would have been a costly proposition.

In addition to the damage brought on by the water infiltration, other factors would surely have inflated the cost of any restoration. Recall that the hotel was built more than 75 years ago. In the three-quarters of a century since that time, construction, plumbing and electrical codes have been updated many times over. Also, the Americans with Disabilities Act requires certain accessibility provisions be made for those with physical limitations.

The ADA requirements alone would have proven difficult to satisfy, given the hotel's general layout. Add to that the fact that any one of the other demands of compliance with the various building codes would have pushed the price of restoration significantly higher, and it becomes somewhat easier to understand why the hotel was not restored.

In the end, though, political pressure to demolish the old hotel - which was dubbed by Mayor Burke in 2003 “an impediment to downtown revitalization” — ultimately proved to be the final blow for the Terre Haute House. Although reuse advocates still maintain that the 1927 Terre Haute House was a great candidate for restoration (despite the cost), each swing of the 6,000-pound wrecking ball that reduced the landmark to rubble in the winter of 2005 punctuated the decision of local government and business leaders to close the door forever on that possibility.

In the same year, Terre Haute officials decided to demolish the city’s landmark hotel, the city fathers of Oklahoma City decided to save theirs. The Skirvin Hotel, built in downtown Oklahoma City in 1910, had, by 1988, succumbed to the same societal changes and resulting economic realities that closed the Terre Haute House for good. Developers there spent $56.4 million to reopen the Skirvin as a 225-room hotel. About $18 million of the funding came in the form of public assistance.

Various developers in Terre Haute came forth with proposals to renovate its famous hotel. These developers sought only $1,000,000 in assistance, either from the public sector or the Hulman family, which had in the past pledged that much to such a project. One such proposal estimated renovation costs at $20,000,000 to reopen the structure as a 138-unit Marriott by Courtyard.

Terre Haute officials published its Request for Proposals on October 14, 2004, but withheld all forms of public support for any project involving the renovation of the existing structure.

There is no real question as to whether the project could have been funded, or if the old hotel could have been restored to become one of the finest hotels in the state. Given essentially the same circumstances Oklahoma did it.

• Chauncey Rose was an early Terre Haute resident who, in 1831, purchased 320 acres (1.3 km²) on both sides of what is now the city's Wabash Avenue. Rose later built the first hotel on that land, the Prairie House, in 1837–38, and operated it until 1841. The hotel reopened in 1849, was renamed the Terre Haute House in 1855, and sold to the Terre Haute Hotel Company (formed by a group of local businessmen) in 1866. Rose Polytechnic Institute (today known as Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology) was named in his honor.
• William B. Hawkins purchased the Terre Haute House from the Terre Haute Hotel Co. in 1872.
• William B. Tuell and George F. Ripley purchased the hotel from Hawkins in 1875. Ripley managed the hotel until 1878.
• Charles Baur leased the hotel in 1884 and installed electric lights in all of its rooms in 1886, making the Terre Haute House the first hotel in the world to be so equipped.
• William Putnam Ijams and his partners Charles and Jacob Baur formed a corporation to purchase the Terre Haute House property in 1888. Ijams later became a partner in the Watson-Beggs Company, which purchased the hotel in 1901.
• Crawford Fairbanks, a noted Terre Haute resident, purchased the hotel from Watson-Beggs in the early 1900s. At one point, he promised to build a new, grand hotel on the site. He died in 1924 without having done so, but his heirs followed up on his promise in 1927.
• Anton "Tony" Hulman Jr. was a prominent Terre Haute industrialist, owner of Hulman & Co. (manufacturer of baking powder, coffee, and other grocery items), and president of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Hulman purchased the hotel in 1959 and closed it in 1970 following several years of a steady decline in business.
• Richard Van Allen, Manager of the hotel during the Hulman years, was charged with the job of telling the hotel's employees that the hotel would close.
• P. Pete Chalos, mayor of Terre Haute from 1980 to 1996, threatened in 1984 to condemn the Terre Haute House if the Hulman family refused to sell it, and later instigated a failed Terre Haute House revival effort headed by Don Daseke.
• Joseph Walesky was the president of Indianapolis-based Metropolitan Management Specialists, Inc., and negotiated unsuccessfully to buy the hotel property in 1986.
• Stephen Cornell l negotiated on behalf of Chicago-based Halcor Realty & Development Co. and Anderson Realty Investment Co. in 1987 and continuing into 1988 to purchase and restore the hotel but was not able to secure financing.
• Don Daseke, a Dallas, Texas, real estate developer and chairman of The Walden Group, worked with little success to put together a package to purchase, renovate, and reopen the Terre Haute House as a Radisson property in the mid-1990s.
• Kevin Burke, mayor of Terre Haute from 2004 to 2008, promised in his election campaign to "settle the issue" of the Terre Haute House. While he did indeed "settle the issue," he was narrowly defeated in his 2007 bid for re-election, and later sued his successor, Duke Bennett, claiming Bennett was ineligible to run for office. The case wound its way through Indiana's courts until finally being decided in Bennett's favor in June 2009.
• Greg Gibson, a Terre Haute businessman and developer, purchased the Terre Haute House and adjacent Bement-Rea and Fort Harrison Savings & Loan buildings from the Hulman family and had them demolished for redevelopment in 2005.
• Timothy J. Dora, whose Fishers, Indiana-based Dora Hotel Company, LLC operates hotels across Indiana, made Terre Haute the next city served by their hotels when the new Hilton Garden Inn Terre Haute was completed on the former Terre Haute House/Fort Harrison S&L/Bement-Rea site in 2007. The company added a second Terre Haute hotel downtown, and a third hotel on the city's south side near I-70 and U.S. 41.

• Whitaker, Sigur E. (2014). Tony Hulman: The Man Who Saved the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. McFarland. ISBN 9781476614939.
• Jakle, John A.; Sculle, Keith A. (2009). America's Main Street Hotels: Transiency and Community in the Early Auto Age. Univ. of Tennessee Press. ISBN 9781572336551.
• Jerse, Dorothy W.; Becker, John R. (2001). Terre Haute & Vigo County in Vintage Postcards. Arcadia Publishing. pp. 73–75. ISBN 9780738507477.

• Historical Treasure: The Terre Haute House, article on the Terre Haute House by the Terre Haute Tribune-Star, October 1, 2022
• Hilton Garden Inn Terre Haute official website
• The Hulman Dynasty; Special series of articles on the Hulman family by the Terre Haute Tribune-Star, May 25–27, 1997
• Vigo County Historical Society
• Terrehautehouse.net; A now-defunct website featuring pre-demolition interior pictures, videos and photos of demolition progress

39.4667°N 87.4067°W / 39.4667; -87.4067