Hotels in Appleton

Appleton sits on the Fox River in northeast Wisconsin, best known as the birthplace of Harry Houdini and the home of Lawrence University, whose small liberal-arts campus anchors a walkable downtown along College Avenue. It grew up as a paper-milling town, and that industrial backbone still shows in the riverside architecture even as the local economy has shifted toward healthcare, insurance and education.

Visitors come mainly for business travel tied to the Fox Cities corporate base, Lawrence events and the Fox Cities Performing Arts Center, or as a stopover en route to Door County. This isn't a tourist destination in its own right, and outside of a handful of downtown blocks the city is fairly spread out and car-dependent, with chain hotels and strip-mall commerce dominating the edges. Winters are long and genuinely cold, which thins out foot traffic downtown for much of the year.