This rendering of the Dolce hotel at North of South speaks to the functional modernism of the Indianapolis project. (Courtesy of The Buckingham Companies)

Look at a map of downtown Indianapolis to see a vibrant city center, the striking Conseco Fieldhouse outpost, industries including the Indianapolis Farm Bureau and WellPoint, and a parking lot between Eli Lilly & Co. and the city’s bustling retail and commercial core. The 11-acre parking lot, more barrier than bridge, is about to be history.

That topography will change dramatically over the next three years as a massive, $155-million project takes shape. North of South, covering about 15 acres, will be developed primarily on the parking lot pharmaceutical giant Lilly owns. It will feature the first Dolce Hotels and Resorts property in Indiana, a 209-unit hotel featuring 57 extended-stay units in a separate structure, along with 16 meeting rooms totaling 15,000 square feet of function space, including a rooftop boardroom.

The project also will boast a 75,000-square-foot YMCA, 10,000 square feet of office space, 320 apartments, 40,000 square feet of retail, and within the hotel alone, four f&b outlets. The endeavor binds the city to developer Buckingham Companies and Dolce. Set to open in fall 2014, this hotel signals Buckingham’s first venture into hospitality.

Ground was broken in April. The first spade of Dolce-related earth was turned over the following month.

"Dolce’s experience in the complete meeting package and development of that as a strategy, and their expertise in that segment of the market, made them stand out as an operator for us," Scott Travis, senior development director for Indianapolis-based Buckingham, said in a recent interview at Buckingham headquarters. Buckingham subsidiary NOS Innovation Partners was formed to develop North of South.

Buckingham will occupy the land in a ground lease from Lilly and own improvements on the land for the 90-year lease term. Financing comes from $86 million in bonds authorized by the 29-member Indianapolis City-Marion County Council; $26 million from Lilly (including the land value); $18 million from the YMCA; $15 million in rights-of-way and infrastructure improvements from the city and state; and $11 million from Buckingham.

Rumbling to Life
Buckingham and Lilly began formulating North of South three years ago, according to Travis. "When we were looking for the right brand for this property I went to all the major brands—the Marriotts, the Hiltons, the Hyatts—to look at what products they had to offer, and what we decided at the end of the day is they did not." The project demanded extended-stay and a strong corporate meetings package, Travis said. After reviewing various RFPs, Buckingham selected Dolce.

Scott Travis (left) and John Betancourt see eye-to-eye on North of South.

According to John Betancourt, Travis’s counterpart at Dolce, the six-story hotel will feature a lobby on the second floor linked to a five-story, extended-stay wing designed to attract Lilly contractors and trainees. Other components of the project include two parking garages that will serve residential, retail and hotel, Dolce’s development services SVP said in the joint interview.

Other reasons Travis cited for choosing Dolce include its flexibility in accommodating the business customer base—it specializes in meetings of 50 to 75 people, not conventions—and its product range. The fact that the hotel will be International Association of Conference Centers-certified was key, too. (Dolce founder/chairman Andy Dolce also founded IACC.) The only other IACC-certified hotel in Indianapolis is University Place Conference Center & Hotel near the Indy campus of Purdue University.

The Dolce hotel will highlight design and art, hallmarks of Buckingham-associated projects, Travis said. In addition, Buckingham is in discussions with Cisco to install state-of-the-art AV and teleconferencing technologies in the hotel. Known as Cisco Telepresence, this boasts “full immersion teleconferencing,” marrying a six-person boardroom in Indianapolis, say, to a counterpart in London—in real time, with full video. Dolce has the technology in the General Electric-associated facility it manages (the John F. Welch Leadership Center) in Ossining, NY, but no place in Indianapolis has one.

Buckingham also aims to incorporate green roofs with vegetation and to reclaim rainwater as a secondary source of non-potable water, Travis said. Indiana limestone and other local materials will be used in construction. The project will deploy energy management systems to control HVAC and LED lighting and use as much natural light as possible, Travis added.

The IACC certification, the advanced technology, and location at the center of 18,000 people working at Lilly, the Farm Bureau, Anthem WellPoint and the imminent headquarters of Rolls-Royce will make Dolce’s hotel “corporate nirvana,” Betancourt said. Other four-diamond properties in the area, including the massive, new JW Marriott, a Hilton, a Hyatt, a Westin and a Sheraton, will compete for corporate transient business.

The City’s Perspective
North of South is an opportunity to extend downtown by developing one of Indianapolis’ last undeveloped areas, says Deputy Mayor Michael Huber. “We’ve had a series of great mayors including Richard Lugar, Bill Hudnut, Steve Goldsmith, Bart Peterson—my boss, Greg Ballard, defeated Bart Peterson—who knew how to align the interests of business and government,” he said in a recent telephone interview, “but we’ve also had a very active civic community that works with government.”

First Indianapolis became known as the nation’s amateur sports capital. Next year, it’s set to host the 2012 Super Bowl. “There’s a civic culture here where it’s this old-fashioned sense of people working to make the community better and it’s easier to get some complex projects done that sometimes can include private-public partnerships because of business and government leadership,” Huber said. “We don’t experience the kind of political gridlock we see in some other cities.”

"What makes us unique,” says Buckingham’s Travis, “is the level of integration into a bigger project. It’s interconnected with residential, office and retail. It is unique to this market. We want to make it become a new destination within the downtown central business district.”