Padlocked fences surround a former Holiday Inn/Days Inn hotel at I-65 and Indiana 43. It has been vacant since 2003. Staff photo by Dave Bangert
BATTLE GROUND – Raise your hand if you ever thought the old Holiday Inn/Days Inn at Interstate 65 and Indiana 43 – once one of Greater Lafayette’s go-to lodging options before turning into a four-story shambles, vacant since 2003 – was ever going to be revived as a hotel.
Even the manager for the Illinois-based investment group that picked up the hulking, moldy, 106,383-square-foot eyesore in spring 2017 – buyers who swore, against eye-rolling popular opinion, that they’d done more with worse – walked in with doubts.
“I kind of wondered,” Mark Petty, project manager for MGM Plaza, told the J&C a little over a year ago, “what have we gotten ourselves into?”
More, perhaps, than the company thought, when it picked up the 6.5-acre property for well less than half the $1.9 million asking price – $750,000, according to county sales disclosures – from a previous owner who admitted to an administrative judge during a condemnation hearing in 2016 that he’d done little to fix or maintain for roughly a decade.
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