Courtesy Lincoln CVB
New hotels planned
Three new hotels are also part of downtown Lincoln’s future. Already, the city has three sizeable meeting properties in its downtown core. The largest, the 297-room Cornhusker Hotel, until recently was a Marriott. Later this summer, a new owner is expected to take over, and it is likely that the Cornhusker will again be affiliated with a national chain. The hotel is open.
“A potential new owner is doing due diligence now,” said Campbell in July, “and we understand that with any new owner there are a lot of great changes in store for us.”
With 46,000 square feet of meeting space, the Cornhusker has more meeting space than any other hotel in town. Second in the amount of meeting space is the 252-room Embassy Suites Lincoln, adjacent to the Lied Performing Arts Center and the Haymarket District and a must-stop for Husker fans on game days.
For every home football game, the hotel’s loading dock becomes a bandstand and 4,000-5,000 fans pour in for the hotel’s Do the Dock tailgating party.
The other downtown conference hotel, the 231-room Holiday Inn Downtown, has 12,000 square feet of meeting space.
The arena project will bring three new hotels downtown. First to open, later this year, will be a 155-room Courtyard by Marriott with 3,000 square feet of meeting space. A 105-room Hilton Garden Inn will open next summer.
The name of the third hotel, to open in 2014, has not been announced, but a 111-room boutique-style property is planned, according to Feyerherm.
Another housing option come 2014 will be suite-style accommodations for 500 in a new residence hall on the UN-L campus adjacent to downtown.
The two-bedroom and four-bedroom suites, with a shared bath and living space, will be available for summer conferences. Each guest will have a bedroom with a twin bed, and although the bath is shared, each part — shower, toilet and double sink — will have a door that can be shut for privacy.
“I think it will open us up to adult groups that looked past us,” said Tony Rathgeber, conference services and events manager for the UN-L. “We are finding is that when a large conference comes to town and uses multiple hotels, they like to have another option, more of a value option.”
Another suite-style residence hall with the same capacity is expected to open on campus in 2015.
Multipurpose museums
Tiered lobbies outside the 2,258-seat Main Stage Theater function as tradeshow or event space at the Lied Performing Arts Center, also part of the university. In July, the center opened Lied Commons, an addition to the building that is used as a meeting space as well as for center performances and educational programming.
One of the campus’ other museums of note, several miles from town on East Campus, is the International Quilt Study Center and Museum.
Opened four years ago, it is a fitting home for the world’s largest publicly held collection of quilts, with 100 on display at any one time.
The museum lobby was designed as a multipurpose space for lectures, receptions and dinners.
“It is a glorious light-filled area behind a glass curtain wall that overlooks all of East Campus and the grand lawn that unfolds before you,” said Patricia Crews, the museum’s director.
Tools used in quilting are displayed in the lobby; large graphic elements above the windows suggest quilt patterns. Even the garden that grows beyond the glass walls subtly mimics a quilt.
Can-do attitude wins fans
Steven Daum had never been to Lincoln before he decided to move the Formula SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) collegiate design series there. Eighty-one teams — about 1,000 college engineering students — registered for this year’s event.
In July, just a few weeks after the four-day event concluded, Daum was preparing to whip off an email to the Lincoln CVB to ask about dates for next year.
There were several reasons the city worked for his group — its Midwestern location made it easier for teams to drive there with the cars they built for the competition. The city had the perfect site for the competition: 90 acres of concrete at the Lincoln Air Park.
Lincoln also was less expensive than the competition’s previous location in Southern California.
But what impressed Daum most were the people he met in Lincoln, from the CVB staff and the construction company that helped prepare the site to volunteers who turned out to help.
“You always have last-minute ideas and in a lot of cases, they are met with reasons why something can’t be done,” he said. “That wasn’t the case in Lincoln.”
Those can-do attitudes, coupled with a skyline full of construction cranes, bode well for Lincoln’s future.
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