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Grand hotel checkout
Time has erased many traces of the state's early luxury tourism, and the Belleview Biltmore could be next.
By TOM ZUCCO
Published December 5, 2004
The buildings had no earthly business stuck out there with the snakes and searing heat. And yet there they were, rising out of the Florida wilderness like the great pyramids. Only these were sprawling, opulent monuments to leisure.
They had broad, sweeping verandas, ornate courtyard fountains, linens and china from Boston, and stained glass and mosaics from Louis Comfort Tiffany & Co. Outside, men in tweed suits and women in floor-length dresses strolled the grounds and played lawn tennis, croquet and a new game called golf.
They were the great Florida luxury hotels of the late 19th century, and even their names were majestic. The Royal Poinciana in Palm Beach. The Windsor Hotel in Jacksonville. The Alcazar and Ponce de Leon in St. Augustine.
Before Florida had a network of cities and roads, before it even had 500,000 residents, it had exotic hotels that would have fit perfectly in New York or Chicago.
The years have been unkind to the grand hotels, even the ones not made of wood. One by one, they fell victim to hurricanes, fire, rising maintenance and renovation costs and skyrocketing property values.
Of the more than 20 grand hotels of the era, only about eight remain. And of those, only five, after extensive remodeling, are still in use as hotels.
Sometime soon, the list could be down to four. The Belleview Biltmore Resort & Spa in Belleair is the latest grand hotel to face extinction. Built with heart of pine lumber from Georgia and Florida and opened on Jan. 15, 1897, the Victorian-style hotel is reputed to be the largest continuously occupied wooden structure in the world. Its guests have included Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, the Duke of Windsor and Bob Dylan.
Two St. Petersburg companies and a Tampa firm joined forces recently to buy and develop the 22-acre hotel property, along with the hotel's 136-acre golf course and its 1-acre gulf-front beach club on Sand Key. The developers want to demolish the hard-to-maintain hotel and build hundreds of townhomes or condominiums.
The developers' plans for the property can't be realized without land-use changes, which means the town of Belleair and the Pinellas County Commission have to review and vote on the proposals.
Already, the battle lines are being drawn.
"The Belleview Biltmore," said Charles Tingley, library manager at the St. Augustine Historical Society, "is the last remnant of the really big Victorian wooden hotels. The only structure even close to it is the Del Coronado in San Diego.
"Take the Biltmore away," said Tingley, who grew up in Seminole, "and you're punching a gaping hole in the historic fabric of Clearwater."
* * *
If railroads were the pipelines that brought large numbers of people to Florida in the late 1880s, the luxury hotels, built next to the tracks, were the reason many of those people got on the trains.
And the pipelines flowed both ways. Trains that carried wealthy northern tourists into the state returned North with oranges, vegetables and, most importantly, stories of warm, easy living.
"The East Coast of Florida is Paradise Regained" reads a Florida East Coast Railway brochure from 1904.
Most of Florida's grand hotels were part of the domain of the dueling Henrys (Plant and Flagler), two wealthy New York businessmen who brought railroads and hotels to the wilds of Florida. Their dream was to create what they called the American Riviera and the Newport of the South.
The two men had a convenient arrangement. Flagler owned the hotels along the Atlantic Coast, including the Ponce de Leon, the Cordova and the Alcazar in St. Augustine; the Hotel Ormond in Ormond Beach; and the Palm Beach Inn (now the Breakers) and Royal Poinciana in Palm Beach.
Plant laid claim to the Gulf Coast and Central Florida. Besides his flagship, the Tampa Bay Hotel, which is now part of the University of Tampa, he owned the Inn at Port Tampa, the Seminole Hotel in Winter Park, the Ocala House, the Fort Myers Hotel, the Kissimmee Hotel, the Punta Gorda Hotel and the Belleview.
Their rivalry was friendly. But it was a rivalry, according to Susan Braden, assistant professor of art history at Auburn University and author of The Architecture of Leisure: The Florida Resort Hotels of Henry Flagler and Henry Plant.
When Plant opened the Tampa Bay Hotel in 1891, he sent a telegram to Flagler inviting him to the celebration. Flagler wired back, "Where's Tampa?"
Plant responded, "Follow the crowds."
There were other great hotels that were not part of the Flagler-Plant system, including the Lakeside Inn in Mount Dora and the Florence Villa Hotel in Winter Haven. To get an idea of its size, when the Florence Villa was torn down in 1943, more than 1-million feet of lumber was recovered.
But from the 1880s until the 1920s, Flagler and Plant could say something no one else could ever claim again: They had a lock on the luxury hotel business in Florida.
That is, until the automobile came along.
Nearly all of the grand hotels were built when automobiles were a novelty. The only way to get to the hotels was by train, and venturing beyond that was sometimes risky. But after the turn of the century, as the number of cars and roads increased, visitors began to explore the rest of the state. And the grand hotels had competition.
"And after Plant and Flagler died, many of the hotels went into disrepair, and there were not enough funds to keep them operable," said Susan Carter, curator-registrar of the Henry B. Plant Museum. "We are so fortunate the University of Tampa needed a home in 1933 and moved into this site, otherwise something might have happened to this building."
Coincidentally, while Plant's star hotel became part of the University of Tampa, Flagler's premiere hotel, the Ponce de Leon, became part of Flagler College.
Of the other grand hotels that weren't burned down, torn down or blown down, there is a common thread that links their survival.
They adapted. Bigger guest rooms, modernized facilities and lots of on-site activities. Especially golf.
"One of the main reasons the Belleview and the Breakers in Palm Beach survived is their association with golf courses," Tingley said. "Many of the grand hotels that still survive out West, like the Grove Park Inn in Nashville, also did it because of their ties with golf. It allowed the hotels to still attract affluent guests."
Although it was built about 25 years after many of the Gilded Era hotels, the Renaissance Vinoy Resort in St. Petersburg is a good example of a grand hotel that fell on hard times but was saved from the wrecking ball to flourish today.
Built in 1925, the Vinoy closed in 1974, and transients were camping in the building within a few years. But voters approved referendums to save the hotel, it received designation as a historic site, and after extensive renovations, it reopened in 1992. Among the new incentives: a 12-court tennis complex, a private marina and an 18-hole golf course, the former Sunset course on Snell Isle.
"The golf course is a key part of what we offer," said Elaine Normile, historian at the Vinoy. "But we also kept the 1925 feel of the hotel. To show you how important that is, we get a lot of visitors from Sarasota who lament the fact the Ringling Hotel was torn down.
"I know it's cheaper to tear (hotels) down and maximize that space. But you can never get that back. And it's happening all over the country."
Longtime residents say that if not for the Hotel Ormond, there might not be an Ormond Beach, and that it's difficult to visualize the town without the hotel. Since 1992, that's what they've had to do.
Purchased by Flagler two years after it was built in 1887, the Hotel Ormond kept ponies for children to ride, and it held the nation's first officially sponsored "auto racing tournaments" on the beach. Among the drivers: Harvey Firestone, Ransom Olds, Louis Chevrolet and Henry Ford.
The Ormond remained a hotel until about six months before the property was sold to a developer.
"It's now the Ormond Heritage Condominiums," Suzanne Heddy, director of the Halifax Historical Museum in nearby Daytona Beach, said with more than a hint of sadness in her voice. "All that's left is the cupola, which is in a park across the street."
The solution to saving the remaining grand hotels, Normile and others say, might lie in what attracted people to them in the first place.
"Exposure," Normile said. "If you have a condo complex, you're only bringing yourself and your family. But if you have a hotel, you're bringing people from all over the country. Even the world."
That may be difficult, said Braden, the author.
"The public as well as the developers need to be reminded of what a symbol these grand hotels are for the state," Braden said. "So often we don't understand our civic heritage."
But there is hope.
"The Don CeSar was in bad shape, too," said Mary Anna Murphy, who recently opened an exhibit of grand hotels at the St. Petersburg Museum of History. "But you see what you've got with the Don and the Vinoy now, and what you could've had with the Soreno." The Soreno, the first million-dollar hotel in St. Petersburg when it was built in 1924, was razed in 1992 to make way for the Florencia, a luxury condominium.
"There's a sense of community pride, of place, just in having something old and precious," Murphy said. "Otherwise, you're really seeing how old Florida has morphed into every other town in the U.S."
ALREADY GONE
FLAGLER HOTELS
Royal Poinciana, Palm Beach, razed
Royal Palm, Miami, razed
Long Key Fishing Club, Long Key, destroyed by hurricane
Hotel Ormond, Ormond Beach, razed
Hotel Continental, Atlantic Beach, destroyed by fire
PLANT HOTELS
Seminole Hotel, Winter Park, destroyed by fire
Punta Gorda Hotel, Punta Gorda, destroyed by fire
Ocala House, Ocala, razed
The Inn at Port Tampa, Tampa, destroyed by hurricane
Fort Myers Hotel, Fort Myers, razed
Kissimmee Hotel, Kissimmee, destroyed by fire
OTHERS
Florence Villa Hotel, Winter Haven, razed
Rockledge Hotel, Rockledge, razed
Windsor Hotel, Jacksonville, destroyed by fire
St. James Hotel, Jacksonville, destroyed by fire
[Last modified December 5, 2004, 00:04:09]
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