Hotel management company Chesapeake Hospitality, which runs eight Ledo chain restaurants around Maryland, will reopen another in the former location at 4509 Knox Rd. in the coming months.

The company recently advertised for new staff for the College Park location, which is listed as “coming soon” on the chain’s website. It posted renovation photos in late June which showed the interior completely stripped.

Ledo got its start in Adelphi near College Park in 1955, but it closed in November after the owners decided to retire. It will reopen as a franchise of the Ledo Pizza chain, which branched off from the original restaurant decades ago.

Like Ledo, Chesapeake Hospitality also got its start as a family-run business in College Park around the same time.

In 1957, a D.C. hotelier bought the Royal Pine Tourist Court at 9113 Baltimore Ave. — now the site of the Days Inn across from Uptown Cheapskate — as a gift to his daughter and her new husband, in part to keep them from moving to California, according to a history of the city’s motels.

The couple, Jeanette and Ed Sims, turned out to have a knack for the family business, expanding the tourist court into a full-sized motel in the 1960s and buying another hotel in 1981, eventually shifting into the hotel management business now run by their children.

While the family sold the Royal Pine in 1988, the original house where they lived while running the hotel can still be seen at the rear of the property. It is the only motel main house that survived College Park’s motel era.

The family-run business now operates 42 hotels in cities like Memphis, St. Louis, Atlantic City, Pittsburgh and Louisville, Ky.

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