Storyline · 1979–1987
In 1979 Chapel Hill approved the 148-room Hotel L'Europe on the bypass. In 1985 the Planning Board approved a Hampton Inn nearby and the 80-room Siena Hotel on the former Brady's Restaurant site, where neighbors objected until an agreement was reached in 1986. The Hampton Inn opened in January 1987, a 3 percent room tax took effect that July over the University's opposition, and the Siena was set to open that fall.
In July 1979 the Chapel Hill Town Council, without opposition, granted a special use permit for the Hotel L'Europe, a 148-room hotel with a restaurant, nightclub and meeting rooms on 5.5 acres on the U.S. 15-501 bypass near Mt. Moriah Church Road, proposed by a Dutch businessman who hoped to open it by spring 1981. Officials said Chapel Hill's motels were booked solid before any event.
On November 4, 1985 the Planning Board approved plans for a 122-room Hampton Inn in two two-story buildings on a 4.9-acre lot near the Hotel Europa, with frontage on Legion Road and U.S. 15-501 and a service road shared with the Europa; the Memphis company building it had paid $885,000 for the land. On November 26 Brady's Restaurant, which had served home-style cooking on East Franklin Street since 1936, closed, and Hakan-Corley Associates, owner of the 2.35-acre site, planned to build the Siena Hotel there. On December 17 the Planning Board approved the Siena, five stories and 80 rooms, with board member Mae McLendon voting no over traffic. Burlage Circle and Estes Drive neighbors objected, and on January 28, 1986 the board declined to reconsider its approval. On February 21 an attorney announced an agreement between the neighborhood's residents and Hakan-Corley and Associates over the hotel.
The Hampton Inn opened on U.S. 15-501 at Europa Drive on January 12, 1987, and the Daily Tar Heel saw it starting a trend of new hotels around Chapel Hill. Chamber of Commerce director Leu Van Ness said existing hotels would have to compete harder outside peak seasons, and town planner Arthur Jackson listed the Siena under construction at Franklin Street and Estes Drive and 18 rooms being added at the University Motor Inn. By March 30, following Town Manager David Taylor's advice, the council approved a resolution telling legislators Joe Hackney and Anne Barnes that it supported state laws letting towns tax hotel and motel rooms, land transfers and tickets to events seating more than 15,000, but agreed to press only for the room tax for now. Taylor estimated a ticket tax on Kenan Stadium and Smith Center events at about $720,000 a year and a room tax at $100,000 to $200,000; Chancellor Christopher Fordham opposed both.
The General Assembly approved the room tax in June at the council's request, and on July 1, 1987 a 3 percent tax took effect on Chapel Hill's roughly 700 hotel and motel rooms, expected to bring the town about $200,000 a year. The town had to spend 10 percent on cultural and visitor programs, and the council gave more than $50,000 of the expected income to N.C. Amateur Sports, the ArtsCenter, the Street Scene and the Chamber of Commerce's Umbria Jazz Festival. The University, which owned the Carolina Inn, had opposed the tax. The 80-room Siena Hotel, built by the Siena Partnership as part of a nine-acre development with the Chapel Hill Center, was scheduled to open on East Franklin Street in late October 1987.
Every statement above comes from these dated entries in the chronology. Each links to its source.
People with a page of their own whom the dated events above name, those named most often first.
No indexed work is about this storyline itself yet. These are about the sites and people its dated events name, those named most often first, so they may discuss the storyline only in part. Follow a link to find a copy or view the material.
Engineer, planner and developer Joseph (Joe) Hakan, who worked for UNC and in private practice in Chapel Hill, interviewed by Doug Eyre on 21 January 2002. Oral history cassette from the Chapel Hill Historical Society's Audiovisual Materials Collection, CHHS.012.
Edward G. Danziger's memoir of love and cooking, published by J. F. Blair in 1967. Danziger (1893 to 1972) ran Danziger's Old World Restaurant in Chapel Hill, and the book tells his life as a restaurateur in the town.
William M. Rohe's history of Research Triangle Park and the region around it, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2011. Topics include regional planning and the economic and social conditions of the Research Triangle Park region, one corner of which is Chapel Hill and the university. 298 pages with illustrations and maps.
Herbert G. Gutman's 1976 history of African American families from 1750 to 1925, published by Pantheon Books in New York, 664 pages with 38 leaves of plates. Its Orange County connection is the Bennehan and Cameron family plantations, Stagville and Fairntosh: the book discusses the people enslaved by Richard Bennehan (1743-1825) and the Camerons, and follows family ties among them under slavery and after emancipation. Subjects include African American families and enslaved persons in Orange County.
Reviewed in The Journal of Southern History (1977), The William and Mary Quarterly (1977), The American Historical Review (1977), Journal of American History (1977), The History Teacher (1977), Political Science Quarterly (1977), Journal of Black Psychology (1978), Journal of Social History (1978), Civil War history (1978), Signs (1978).
Orvin Lee Shiflett's biography of William Terry Couch, 1901 to 1988, the editor who built up UNC Press at Chapel Hill over four decades in publishing, with a subtitle that calls his career a lightning rod for controversy. Chapters treat culture in the South, a case history in book publishing, objectivity and social science and 'The Sainted Book Burners'. It bears on scholarly publishing and university presses in the twentieth century. McFarland, 2015, 268 pages with illustrations.
Albert N. Link's early history of Research Triangle Park, published in 1995 by the Research Triangle Foundation of North Carolina. Topics include research parks, research institutes and industrial research in the state, with the park's own history at the center. 149 pages with illustrations and maps.
Annette Marie Council's book about her family and Mama Dip's Country Kitchen, the Chapel Hill restaurant, published by NP Press in 2005. Subjects include African Americans in Chapel Hill, the restaurant's history and family biography. Fourteen introductory pages and 223 pages of text with illustrations, part local history and part family account.
Albert N. Link's history of the Research Triangle Park, the research park founded to draw on the universities at Chapel Hill, Durham and Raleigh, published in 2002 by the Research Triangle Foundation of North Carolina in 278 pages with illustrations. Topics include research parks, research institutes and industrial research in North Carolina and the history of the park itself.
Charles X. Larrabee's history of the Research Triangle Institute over its first thirty one years, published in 1991. Topics include research institutes and research parks in North Carolina and the history of Research Triangle Park, the research district that lies between Chapel Hill, Durham and Raleigh.
Alex Sayf Cummings's 2020 book on the knowledge economy of the Research Triangle, technology research and the history of Research Triangle Park. Chapel Hill and its university form one corner of the Triangle.
A tour guidebook prepared for the 2016 Vernacular Architecture Forum conference in Durham, leading visitors through buildings in Orange and Caswell counties. It takes in the architecture of the bright leaf tobacco economy and the work of Thomas Day, the free Black cabinetmaker of Caswell County who worked in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Account of student protest in 1960s Chapel Hill, published by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2007 with illustrations. It draws together the civil rights movement and segregation in the town, discrimination in restaurants, academic freedom and university autonomy, protest against the Vietnam War, Students for a Democratic Society and the Black Student Movement on campus.
Maxine Freeland's biography of James John Freeland (1918-1999), a Hillsborough man of the twentieth century, compiled in 1999.
Each dated event above names its source, the place to start. For finding more on an event across newspapers, records and histories, see the research guide Follow an event across several accounts. Ask at the North Carolina Room of the Orange County Public Library for help with local sources.
Friends of the Orange County Public Library. “New hotels and the room tax in Chapel Hill, 1979–1987.” Orange County Indexed, https://focplnc.org/orange-county-books/storylines/hotels-room-tax-storyline-1979/. Accessed October 22, 2026.
