The Holiday Inn at 320 Hillsborough Street stopped taking reservations in 2025. It never closed for good and it never came down. In the next few days it reopens as Hotel Indigo Raleigh, the same twenty-story cylinder that has looked out over the NC State campus since 1969, carrying a $36 million renovation, 204 rooms, and a new bar on the floor everyone in Raleigh has joked for decades used to spin. It never did. It just felt that way from the top.
That building's survival matters here for a reason beyond nostalgia. Every headline opening on Hillsborough Street this year is happening inside a structure that predates the business now occupying it. The street isn't adding square footage so much as it's cycling through what's already standing, and the reasons a hotel, a chicken finger chain, and a beignet shop all landed in old shells instead of new construction say something real about how this corridor works.
The Building That Almost Became a Glass Tower
The round Holiday Inn was built in 1969 as one of 25 circular hotels conceived by Holiday Inn founder Kemmons Wilson, and it was Raleigh's tallest building for its first eight years. It spent a stretch as a Clarion Hotel starting in 2004 before a Miami developer bought it for $9.4 million in 2012 and put it back under Holiday Inn management. In 2021, Tidal Real Estate Partners bought the property with a very different plan: tear down the odd cylinder and replace it with a 20-story glass tower mixing hotel rooms, apartments, and retail. The demolition news drew a cult following. House of Swank sold T-shirts.
Then, in the middle of 2025, Tidal reversed course. IHG Hotels and Resorts confirmed the shape would stay and the building would become a Hotel Indigo, a brand built around small, individually owned boutique properties. Tidal's CEO had pointed to a shortage of high-end hotel rooms downtown as the market case for keeping the site in hospitality use, but keeping this particular shape was a choice, not a requirement. That choice got a second layer of support in November 2025, when the city designated the former Holiday Inn a Raleigh Historic Landmark. The designation comes with an annual 50 percent property tax deferral for as long as the building's character is maintained through the city's certificate of appropriateness process, which means the decision to preserve the cylinder now pays the owner back every year it stays intact.
The result, arriving this week, is a hotel with a ground-floor café and lounge and a 20th-floor restaurant and bar called High Ground, built inside a frame nobody had to design from scratch.
The Marquee That Outlasted Four Kinds of Business
A few blocks down, Raising Cane's opened in early 2026 inside a building at 2420 Hillsborough Street that has never sat empty for long, but has also never stayed one thing. Built in 1921, it started as a retail establishment, then became a movie theater with two seven-foot screens wired for cable television, a novelty strong enough that, according to NC State communications strategist Tim Peeler, students gathered there to watch the Challenger explosion and the Branch Davidian standoff unfold live. A McDonald's moved in later and stayed until 1996, then the space sat vacant until 2002, when a university textbook store took it over, followed by a string of restaurants that ended with Umami Asian Bistro.
When Umami closed, the building went quiet again until Raising Cane's signed on. The chain's stated plan wasn't to gut the site. A company representative described the approach directly: the design would showcase Cane's own culture and story while incorporating touches that reflect the local community, and that included preserving the building's signature marquee sign along with several other architectural elements from its past lives. A hundred-year-old building now carries a national fried chicken brand and a rooftop patio, with the same sign that once advertised a movie house still hanging out front.
Peeler's read on why this location keeps surviving turnover, even as tenants change every few years, points to two changes on the street itself. Roundabouts have cut down on the traffic problems that used to make the corner risky for a business hoping to draw people from off campus. And a growing base of year-round apartment residents, not just students in dorms, has made it possible for a chain restaurant to succeed there in a way it might not have a decade ago.
Jeff Murison, president and CEO of the Hillsborough Street Community Service Corporation, the merchant-backed group known as Live It Up! Hillsborough Street, has watched that shift up close.
"We now have multiple mixed-use market-rate residential properties, where folks of all ages are living year-round." Murison added that this population helps make businesses on the street more resilient outside the academic year, and that Hillsborough Street's role as a major corridor into downtown means it isn't as exposed to the academic calendar as other college-adjacent strips.
Mitch's Tavern is the name Peeler points to as the exception that proves the rule. Long stretches of turnover are normal here. A handful of businesses, Mitch's among them, have simply outlasted the churn.
The Small Version of the Same Story
Not every change on the street is a landmark reopening. Beignets & Brew, a franchise serving traditional and flavored beignets alongside coffee and breakfast sandwiches, moved into the Stanhope Apartment building this year in the former home of Mulan Ice Cream & Milk Tea. It's a smaller swap than a hotel rebrand or a chicken chain moving into a converted movie house, but it's the same pattern at a different scale: an existing ground-floor retail space in an existing residential building, filled by a new operator rather than a new structure.
Three tenants, three different reasons for landing where they did:
- Hotel Indigo Raleigh kept the cylinder because a historic landmark tax deferral now rewards preserving it, on top of a market case for more downtown hotel rooms
- Raising Cane's kept the marquee because the brand's own story leaned on the building's history, and roundabouts plus year-round residents lowered the business risk that used to sink restaurants there
- Beignets & Brew filled a storefront that already existed inside an apartment building, no new lease-up required
What the Investment Number Actually Covers
The Hillsborough Street district has documented $399 million of direct investment since 2016, tracked by Live It Up! Hillsborough Street as part of its ongoing project list. That's a real number, and it's easy to read as evidence of new buildings rising along the corridor. But none of the three highest-profile openings hitting the street in 2026 required pouring a new foundation. The money has gone into streetscape work, wider sidewalks, slower traffic, added parking, the kind of infrastructure that makes existing storefronts easier to fill rather than the kind that creates new ones. Fifteen years ago, Murison has noted, the city was still finishing the first phase of that streetscape work. The buildings people are walking into this year are the same ones that were there before the sidewalks got wider. What changed is how much safer and more populated the walk between them became.
For anyone who's watched Hillsborough Street cycle through tenants for years, the pattern holds again in 2026. The street isn't growing outward. It's refilling itself, one existing building at a time, and the businesses lasting longest tend to be the ones that made peace with the shell they inherited instead of trying to erase it.
If you've been watching this corridor change hands and want a clearer read on what that means for property values in the blocks feeding it, John Merriman has spent decades tracking exactly this kind of shift across Raleigh's in-town neighborhoods. Reach out anytime to talk through what's happening on your block.
