I just spent way too much time figuring this out, so hopefully this will save you some time.

6 months ago or so from now (June 2011) it was possible to merge your Facebook Place page with your Fan page.  This was a good thing because it was pretty annoying that people would “Check-In” to your businesses’ page, but it was the wrong one.

There are still thousands of articles on the web on how to Merge your pages.  If that wasn’t bad enough, a lot of them warn you NOT to merge your pages because it changes the layout irreversibly for the worse.

Here is the punchline:

To “merge” your Facebook Place and Fan Page, just add a street address to your Fan Page and DELETE the Place page.

Now you have a unified Place & Fan Page.

Update 6/24:

Immediately after the merge & deletion, I noticed I could not check-in to the newly “converted” Places Page.  I tried a few things such as changing the address slightly, and even deleting the address so that it would tell me at the top of the page that I could convert this Page to a check-in place by adding an address.  Nothing worked.  So finally I emailed Facebook.

 This is the response I got:

Hi David,

We are aware of the problem that you described and apologize for the inconvenience. Unfortunately, we do not have a specific date for when this issue will be resolved but hope to fix it as soon as possible. We appreciate your patience 

Thanks for contacting Facebook,
Oliver
User Operations
Facebook

Soo…. proceed with caution until Facebook gets their shit together.