The Craddock Terry Hotel’s Shoemakers restaurant will serve its last dinner on Oct. 3, and its event center will host gatherings through Oct. 31.
The closed spaces will be repurposed into 22 guest rooms, adding to the 44 current rooms, according to the hotel’s website. The hotel and its Waterstone Pizza dining option will continue to operate during the renovation process.
The hotel opened in 2007, and since then, Shoemakers and the event center have been a community gathering place for business meetings, rehearsal dinners, wedding festivities and more.
“You do take that all into account when you consider closing something that’s been so ingrained in the community,” said Ed Virtue, the regional director of operations with Cornerstone Hospitality, the hotel’s management company, in a phone interview. “It’s very bittersweet for us.”
The renovation is estimated to cost $3.5 million, Virtue said. Two main patterns prompted the decision to start the project now.
First, it’s hard to operate a restaurant in the post-pandemic economy, he said, as the cost of food, labor and other operational costs have increased.
“If you were to talk to anybody in the hospitality industry now, they would share the same sort of feeling that the pressure of costs and running a restaurant have changed dramatically over the course of the years since COVID,” Virtue said. “It’s certainly something that’s become much more difficult to run profitably than it used to be.”
At the same time, he said, demand for rooms is strong. The Craddock Terry has more demand than available rooms many nights of the week, especially during busy seasons — like late spring, when visitors flock to Lynchburg’s five colleges and universities for graduations.
“The ability to open up these rooms and take more graduation guests and special occasion guests … is a major catalyst for this to make sense,” Virtue said.
He said he aims for construction to be done in the spring of 2027 to be ready for the next round of commencements.
Tourism growth has been strong citywide, said Andrew Marks, Lynchburg’s assistant director of tourism, in an email. Direct visitor spending reached more than $272 million in 2025, he said. That’s up 71% from a pandemic low of about $160 million and up 32% from a pre-pandemic 2019 benchmark of about $206 million.
And the Craddock Terry has been a “trailblazer” for tourism growth over two decades, said Marjette Upshur, Lynchburg’s director of economic development, in a phone interview.
The venue’s Lynchburg roots stretch back to 1888, when the Craddock Terry Shoe Company was founded. It grew to be one of the largest shoe companies in the country and a backbone of the Lynchburg economy — in its prime, it produced 100,000 pairs of shoes each day at its factory on the James River, according to the hotel’s website.
When the factory and an adjacent tobacco warehouse were converted into the hotel, it became a success story of downtown revitalization and created momentum to bring other restaurants and businesses to the former industrial hub, she said. The hotel spurred the creation of the bluffwalk that many residents now use to stroll through downtown.
The downtown is much busier now than it was when the hotel was founded, with dozens of restaurants and event spaces, Upshur said. Those new locations can serve former Shoemakers customers, while the Craddock Terry fills its planned additional rooms — which won’t be a challenge, she said, because lodging that is within walking distance to restaurants and entertainment is always in demand.
“To have more rooms available, that just strengthens the anchor on that end of Main Street,” she said.
