On your left, look for the tall, red-brick, blocky 14-story hotel crowned with a big rooftop sign that spells out “HOTEL PERE MARQUETTE.”
This is the Peoria Marriott Pere Marquette, and it’s basically the last one standing from Peoria’s fancy-hotel arms race of the 1920s. Planning kicked off in 1924, when local business leaders decided Peoria needed a proper high-end place for visiting big shots… and for locals who wanted a night that felt a little more “Waldorf-Astoria” than “room over the store.” They brought in hotel manager Horace Leland Wiggins to steer the ship, and by 1926 the hotel was up-at a cost of $2.5 million back then, which is about $44 million today.
They even ran a little naming contest… a sweepstakes, with 50 bucks to the winner. Nothing says “classy new hotel” like crowdsourcing the name. The winner: Hotel Père Marquette, nodding to Father Jacques Marquette. And when the place opened in January 1927, Peoria showed up like it was the only party in town-about 16,000 people came through. That’s not a ribbon-cutting. That’s a human tide.
Architecturally, it was designed to look confident and orderly-symmetry, straight lines, brick and stone-very “we’ve got our act together.” Philadelphia architect Horace Trumbauer led the design, with local heavyweight Herbert Edmund Hewitt collaborating. If you look up near the roofline, there’s a stone cornice ringed with carved faces-Native American and animal heads-keeping watch from up top.
Inside was where the real wow lived: a grand lobby, big meeting rooms, and the Cotillion Room ballroom with its domed ceiling, mirrors like French windows, and ornate plasterwork. Murals once covered key spaces-one showing Marquette arriving, another showing La Salle leaving France-history served with a side of chandeliers. The hotel has 288 guest rooms, because in the 1920s, more was more.
Over the decades it kept reinventing itself-renovations in the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s, then a major restoration in 1981. It joined Hilton in 1972, later returned to its original name, and landed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982. It closed in 2011 for a big Marriott makeover and reopened in 2013… though later, a 2020 indictment alleged financial crimes tied to the redevelopment, with a trial starting in 2023. Even hotels, apparently, can have complicated third acts. Another renovation followed in 2022, because downtime is not in a hotel’s job description.
When you’re set, the United States District Court for the Central District of Illinois is a 2-minute walk heading northwest.
