BATON ROUGE - Sitting on Eddie Robinson Sr. Drive is the historic Hotel Lincoln. It's a Baton Rouge landmark with a lot of history.

Opened in 1955, it was the first Black-owned hotel in the area. Its popularity grew after appearing in green books, a guide of businesses, hotels and safe spaces for Black people to go during segregation. 

"There's a time in history not just in our city but cities around the south where black cultural entertainers, visitors and politicians weren't able to stay in the hotels downtown so the Hotel Lincoln provided an opportunity right outside of downtown, right next to the Lincoln Theatre where a lot of them were performing," East Baton Rouge Director of Community Revitalization Marlee Pittman said.

The Hotel Lincoln was luxurious for its time, hosting 46 rooms with bathtubs and air conditioning throughout the entire building. Luxury attracted stars, and the Hotel Lincoln hosted famous musicians such as James Brown, Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding to name a few.

"Some really big names came to the city of Baton Rouge and they stayed at Hotel Lincoln and performed at Lincoln Theatre right down the road. The office of community development is working to support both as a concentrated effort to target investors and revitalize those historic cultural touchstones," Pittman said.

The building has sat vacant since the 1980s. In 2019, a local developer purchased the building for $400,000, hoping to turn the property into apartments with retail tenants on the bottom floor but that plan fell through and the Lincoln remains waiting desperately for repair.

Now there is new hope for the hotel. A developer based in Baton Rouge is planning a renovation and restoration of the hotel for a mixed-use development that would host affordable housing units along with office spaces for local non-profits.

"By investing in this focused area we are hoping to turn a neighborhood over in a way that keeps residents in mind, creates opportunities for the residents to come back in the neighborhoods they grew up in and creates economic opportunities for all of those people who will now call it home," Pittman said.

The Metro Council will vote Wednesday to contribute $100,000 in funding from Housing and Urban Development to help restore the hotel.