The Bethel AME Church is four blocks north of the ICC on West street. An easy and safe walk to the show site. Two more hotels to serve downtown.

Randu

Downtown hotel plan incorporates black church
April 2, 2016
Scott Olson

Upscale Indianapolis-Area Hotels

The Bethel AME church on Vermont Street was built in 1869 to serve the growing number of blacks arriving from the South following the Civil War. (IBJ photo/Eric Learned)The city’s oldest African-American church is poised to become a hotel as part of a larger, $30 million project that could add more than 200 rooms to downtown’s lodging inventory.

Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church at 414 W. Vermont St. on downtown’s west side was built in 1869 and has served the black community at its current location for nearly 150 years. But dwindling membership and an aging building requiring costly repairs are forcing the congregation to sell the historic property near the Central Canal.
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Church leaders have reached an agreement with local hotelier Bharat Patel’s Sun Development & Management Corp., which has the site under contract.

Sun’s plans for the Bethel site call for two hotels—one a redevelopment of the historic church building and the other to be built next to it on a lot fronting West Street. The second hotel would include three levels of parking and roughly 10,000 square feet of retail space.

“I think it will be a dynamite development along the canal,” said Patel, Sun’s CEO. “That quadrant [of downtown] doesn’t have enough hotels.”

The closest are the Marriott’s Courtyard at the Capital and its Residence Inn, both across the canal from Bethel.

Patel expects the two hotels will total about 200 rooms and serve visitors to IUPUI, the hospitals on the campus, and the NCAA headquarters along the canal to the south.

Good for Gen Con maybe. 

Sad for that congregation.

Hopefully they got a good amount of money for their dwindling congregation.

Only 200 rooms between 2 hotels?  That is pretty small.  Sounds like their business model will be more high end which could have room rates being on the higher end.

If you know the area there is not much room between West Street and the Canal. Plus 100 rooms per hotel is what I would guess is normal for a boutique hotel. The thing is to my best count this is the seventh or eighth hotel announce in a years time for the downtown area. Now not all are going to get built but it only 1/2 that is is going to be something.
Randu

What this says is that Indianapolis Hoteliers take the lack of hotel rooms for the cities big events serious. Now my rought count is 8 anounced hotel projects and even 4 open that's outstanding seeing we are not talking about a expansion of the ICC. When the city gets around to announcing an expansion of the ICC look to least one major hotel(according to the past two expansions) several medium hotels.
Randu

...and there's no guarantee that GenCon attendance numbers will remain this high for the next ten years.

Let us not forget that a shortage of rooms does help the established hotels profitability.  Simple supply and demand graph here folks.

Indy has several events that far eclipse Gen Con in numbers so this is a good thing for the city.  And for us gamers, too.