USA:
The Brave New World of Extremes
While it lost its Howard Johnson's Restaurant when it was converted
into the Park Place restaurant after 1985, the Motor Lodge retained
its name until 1993. Apparently it served a brief stint as the
Executive Center Hotel before being converted into a Holiday Inn
and Angel's Diner.
Then
during 2004 the site was closed and temporarily reopened as a
Best Value Inn. On September 18, 2005 Orlando Sentinel
columnist, Jim Toner, reported that the former HoJo's was to become
an excusive condo-hotel called The Lexington. Part of a more than
$500 million mixed use urban utopia development called CityPlace,
the former HoJo's would have been utterly transformed and surrounded
by towering skyscrapers--its patrons to be the uber-elite, and
a far cry from the ordinary Americans that it had initially been
designed to serve...
Too
good to be true or much less very real the schemes and grandiose
plans of CityPlace collapsed, and the property became the Crowne
Plaza Orlando Downtown Hotel. |