Terre Haute House - Downtown's Decline Doesn't Spare The House

Downtown's Decline Doesn't Spare The House

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 was 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. He'd proven time and again that with careful investment, good stewardship, and solid advertising, he could turn a profit from virtually any entity he touched.

But not even the man with the seemingly golden touch could stave off the inevitable for long. Whether Hulman or anyone else knew it or not, the grand old hotel's glory days as the centerpiece of downtown were coming to an end by the early 1960s.

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. “Unprofitable” was not a word Tony Hulman liked to hear, but, according to the late Richard Van Allen, who managed the hotel at the time, Hulman did try 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.

But it was all for naught.

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.