The Urbana-Lincoln Hotel - Lincoln Square Mall is a historic building complex located at 300 South Broadway Avenue in Urbana, Illinois. The Tudor Revival style hotel was built in 1923. In 1964, the mall was built as an extension of the hotel; it was one of the first fully enclosed shopping malls in Illinois. Both the hotel and the mall are still in operation, and the building complex was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2006.Hotel historyA local booster organization called the Urbana Hotel Company began raising money for a hotel in Urbana in 1921. The group raised $223,000 by selling shares in the hotel, and construction on the Urbana-Lincoln Hotel began in 1923. The hotel opened to guests by November of that year and was formally dedicated on January 31, 1924. Local architect Joseph Royer designed the hotel in the Tudor Revival style; the building features extensive half-timbering on its stucco exterior. The hotel was not profitable, and the Urbana Hotel Company went bankrupt in 1937; the hotel stayed open after the company was reorganized. A new management company, the Urbana-Lincoln Company, took over the hotel in 1944 and extensively modernized it in the following decade. The hotel was incorporated into the mall's plans from the outset and was sold to mall owners Carson Pirie Scott shortly after the mall opened. After failing to turn a profit, the hotel closed in 1975 and was slated to be demolished; however, new owners renovated and reopened the hotel later in the decade, and an addition was built on the building in 1982. The hotel has passed through several owners since and remains in operation.
