For more than half a century, the Hotel Danville at 600 Main Street, was the address for thousands of visitors to this community. Most were tourists and business men and women, but the hotel also numbered among its guests such luminaries as Eleanor Roosevelt. Since 1984, this solid structure, now listed on the National Register of Historic Places, has continued to serve the community as Danville House, a handsome adaptive reuse as apartments for area citizens, especially older people on moderate or fixed incomes. 

When completed in 1927, it was hailed as a modern facility that added many new guest rooms to those already available at the Burton, Stonewall, and Leeland hotels, also on Main Street. Of these, only the Leeland---just across from the Danville House---still stands, The new hotel rose to eight stories to become the city’s second ‘skyscraper’, joining the (en-story Masonic Temple completed just a block north in 1921. Its first two floors, like most of the Masonic Temple, are sheathed in architectural terra cotta glazed to resemble Light-colored granite or limestone. The old hotel’s warm red brick is also accented with quoins and a parapet of the same material. This balustraded parapet with its immense classical urns adds great dignity to the mid-rise Classical Revival building, which was situated so that its principal elevations on a wide corner at Main and Floyd streets face the Dan River at the foot of Main Street hill. A revolving door leads to one of the building’s most striking features, a two- story lobby of stream-lined Classical design, almost Art Deco in appearance. This beautiful space has been repainted in its original hues for use as a Commons for Danville House. Originally, the hotel 
also shared much of the first floor with Danville’s leading furniture store of the era, Clements & Parker. 

The remainder of the first floor was occupied by the Capitol Theater, which opened during the silent era showing such classics as ‘A Hero on Horseback,’ starring Hoot Gibson. It remained Danville’s premier first-run theater for many decades until it closed in the early 1970’s. 

In 1983, Allen Management Company, Boston, Massachusetts, rehabilitated this sound structure of steel and reinforced concrete construction. Using the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Historic Preservation, they were able to qualify this sensitive adaptive re-use as a Federal Tax Act project, and provide the city with one of its first quality facilities for senior citizens---as well as a first venture into downtown housing.