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Built 1930 · A hotel into the late century · Apartments today
Lead: The Hoffman Hotel, at 120 West LaSalle Avenue just west of the LaSalle, was built in 1930 at a cost of five hundred thousand dollars: twelve stories of red brick with limestone trim and terra-cotta mosaic panels, by Willard M. Ellwood — the LaSalle Annex's architect, who had worked with Frank Lloyd Wright on the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. The Register's form gives its measure: twenty-one small apartments and one hundred and fifty guest rooms. It was partly owned by Jacob Hoffman, the manager of the LaSalle Hotel and its Annex, and the Register's narrative draws the intersection's whole picture: all three of its hotels — the LaSalle, the Annex, and the Hoffman — were owned or operated at one time by Jacob Hoffman, and the three were among five major downtown hotels in the South Bend of the 1930s. The other two of the five were the Oliver and the Jefferson, and the same sentence carries their fate: both were demolished in an early urban-renewal project.
The Hoffman survived what the Oliver and the Jefferson did not. It stands today as the Hoffman Hotel Apartments: forty-eight income-restricted apartments under the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program, managed by Flaherty & Collins, under a 2014 development agreement with the city's Redevelopment Commission that carried up to $175,000 in tax-increment financing. Like the LaSalle across the avenue, the Hoffman ended its lodging life as housing — the two survivors of the intersection's hotel row both converted, in the same decade, by the same mechanism, while their three contemporaries are gone.
Sources:
- National Register of Historic Places nomination form, Hoffman Hotel (1930; $500,000; 150 rooms and 21 apartments; Jacob Hoffman; the five downtown hotels of the 1930s).
- Flaherty & Collins and the 2014 Redevelopment Commission development agreement (48 LIHTC apartments; up to $175,000 TIF).