Springfield was a grand hotel town in the ’20s. It was the state capital, a tourist mecca and a “good convention town” too, meaning it offered gambling, booze, women and a police force under orders to leave the customers alone as long as they didn’t do it in any of the churches or public parks. No wonder conventioneers piled off trains like schoolkids tumbling out of the yellow school buses in the spring at New Salem.
It was the heyday of full-service commercial hotels such as the Abraham Lincoln, the Leland and the St. Nicholas. Expositions and trade shows used rented space in the state armories, old and new, but for meetings each big convention hotel functioned as a mini-convention center. But while downtown Springfield was a good town to hold a convention in, it was not always a good town to run a convention hotel in.
The Abraham Lincoln – aka “the Lincoln” or “the Abe,” which I once compared in these pages to a grand old ocean liner that had somehow been docked at Fifth and Capitol – closed its doors for good in 1964 after only 39 years. The Leland closed in 1970 and the St. Nick (finally) closed for good in 1977. When I listened to the Modern Jazz Quartet perform here in 1972 I imagined myself in the old Palm Room of the Lincoln or even the old Leland ballroom of my youth but I was, in fact, in the Holiday Inn East, which was as close as the city could come to the Hotel Abraham Lincoln in that day.
Boosters hope to double the size of the capital city’s downtown convention center but the only surviving big downtown hotel is the President Abraham Lincoln, which opened in 1985 and was built as the headquarters hotel for the old Prairie Capital Convention Center. (The Forum 30 was never a hotel, only a big building with a motel in it.) Even the President Lincoln’s 300 top-quality rooms are not enough to accommodate visitors to events such as this year’s Illinois Comic Con, which will take place in Peoria. Thus the new tourism authority, if approved, would build a new 200-300-room “headquarters hotel” that will make Seventh Street great again and put Springfield back on the downstate convention map (See “Something for nothin,’” April 16).
The Leland Hotel, on the northwest corner of Sixth Street and Capitol Avenue, is pictured in the 1950s. It hosted travelers, politicians and celebrities for more than 100 years before closing its doors in 1970. PHOTOS COURTESY SANGAMON VALLEY COLLECTION
Will it work? Convention centers make business for hotels, and are not expected to make money themselves. But a new convention center hotel will be expected to make money. In judging its prospect, it is important to remember that the city’s grand old hotels did not go out of business just because they were old. Well into the 1960s, 3,000 delegates to the Illinois AFL-CIO convention piled into Springfield for their annual schmooze and they were piled deepest at the Lincoln. No, their decrepitude owed to a dozen other ailments.
By 1971 the traveling public no longer traveled to Springfield by trains that deposited them within blocks of the downtown hotels. Local boosters pressed the state legislature for a new law that created the Springfield Metropolitan Exposition and Auditorium Authority in 1972 to save a moribund downtown but failed to consider that in an automobile age downtown might not be the place to put it.
A bigger factor was not how people came downtown but who came. While the old hotels might have made their profit for the year on big conventions, their bread and butter was earned lodging business travelers and people in town on state business, including lawmakers and lobbyists. The legislature’s switch to annual sessions in 1971 meant a lot of lawmakers ceased to be visitors and became part-time residents who live in Airbnbs or apartments instead of hotel rooms. Lawmakers on a lark indulged themselves in clubs like the Lake Club or the Opera House instead of hotel lounges. State workers don’t travel as much as they used to, thanks to the internet. Ditto the traveling salesmen who for decades were to convention hotels what college student were to cheap bars. (The first official guest at the old Abraham Lincoln in 1925 was a traveling salesman.) Family tourists still visited downtown but increasingly they slept in one of the city’s many convenient roadside parking lots with accessory hotels.
Imagine a department store having to rely only on shoppers looking for socks.
I’ve been wrong before. I loved the old downtown hotels and hope this one succeeds while rowing against the currents. In fact, I’d like to help by offering it a name, free of charge – the Talisman. That was the name of the steamboat that dodged and dragged its way up the Sangamon River in 1832, exciting boosters to dream (as they still do) about Springfield becoming a new Peoria. Alas, the river dropped before the champagne bottles were empty and the boat had to back up all the way to Beardstown and the Illinois River, never to come back. True, the boat didn’t sink. But it didn’t make Springfield a bustling river port, either.
Mr. Krohe likes to think he is old enough to know better. For his account of the demolition of the old Abraham Lincoln Hotel, see “Adieu to the Abe.”
This article appears in May 14-20, 2026.
