The founders of Florida fantasy

Two Henrys - Plant and Flagler - harnessed nature and literally built the concept of an ideal getaway in an uncomfortable place. Nothing Mickey Mouse in these efforts, two new books point out.

Henry Morrison Flagler built his Florida railway and hotel empire after making his fortune as a founder of Standard Oil.

Henry Bradley Plant brought his South Florida Railroad to Tampa, where he built the Tampa Bay Hotel.

By COLETTE BANCROFT, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published December 8, 2002

Who invented Florida?

If you're a transplant, when you headed south from the Midwest or Northeast, did you know about the weather in August, the mosquitoes and roaches, the sharks and gators, the hurricanes and sinkholes, the water shortages and the Devil Rays?

Probably not. You probably knew what you saw in glossy ads and Disney World brochures. Maybe you'd even been here for vacation, but mostly you knew about the renourished beach, the computer-generated theme park and, oh yes, the theme hotel.

In John Sayles' recent movie Sunshine State, a Greek chorus of golfers punctuates the plot with cynical commentary on the development of Florida. The state is "nature on a leash," one of them declares.

It's true, and it didn't start with Disney. Fantasies about Florida have trumped reality for more than a century. Two new books offer insight into how carefully the state's image was being crafted more than a hundred years ago, mainly by two men named Henry.

The Architecture of Leisure (University Press of Florida, $34.95) by Susan R. Braden, an assistant professor of art history at Auburn University, is a scholarly, entertaining look at the history and cultural significance of the resort hotels built by railroad magnates Henry Flagler and Henry Plant.

Last Train to Paradise: Henry Flagler and the Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Railroad That Crossed an Ocean (Crown, $24) is Miami novelist Les Standiford's lively account of Flagler's final great project, the construction of the rail line from Miami to Key West.

Plant and Flagler left their marks, and their names, all over the state. Plant's South Florida Railroad put Tampa on the map and connected the sparsely populated west coast of the state with the rest of the world. Flagler's Florida East Coast Railway pushed down the other shore from Jacksonville to Miami (which Flagler pretty much created single-handed; he had to talk the city out of naming itself after him) and finally all the way to Key West.

The two men saw the trains not only as a way to move goods, although that was important (they vied for years to corner the lucrative Cuba trade). Their shared vision and field of battle was tourism. They built the first hotels that tourists would ride the trains to see -- and spend their money in.

In 1880, Florida's population was 269,500. That's less than one-third the number of people (924,610) living in Pinellas County in 2001.

The biggest city in the state in 1880 was Key West, with just under 10,000 residents. Where Miami teems today was Fort Dallas, a muddy settlement with a few hundred inhabitants.

By 1900 the state's population had almost tripled, to 752,619. Tampa, a speck on the map 20 years before, had become a major city with 15,839 people (about enough to fill one-quarter of Raymond James Stadium).

What powered that early boom in large part was Plant's and Flagler's version of tourism. Before they started laying track and building hotels that looked like palaces, most of Florida's tourists were invalids. People with all sorts of ailments were sent to recover in the balmy weather, but accommodations ranged from spartan to comfortable.

[Photo: University of Florida Library]

A brochure for Henry Flagler’s Florida East Coast Railway.

Only people with lots of money traveled for pleasure, and they went places that offered things to do and see. In 1880 most of Florida was wild frontier, dotted with fishing and farming villages and military outposts. Except for a few rail lines, travel meant horseback, wagon or steamboat, all slow and often uncomfortable, and when you got there -- well, there wasn't any theme park.

The luxury destination resort, offering not only posh digs but so many activities and diversions that guests never need to leave the grounds, was an innovation Plant and Flagler introduced to Florida. It was an idea that changed the state forever.

Braden writes in The Architecture of Leisure that in the 1890s increasing numbers of visitors "came to inspect the Florida that Flagler and Plant publicized as exotically attractive, healthfully restorative, and filled with luxurious and imaginative hotels. Through their promotional material, Flagler and Plant did much to create the now familiar image of Florida as a comfortable, pleasurable, even utopian destination."

'Where's Tampa?'

Henry Bradley Plant, born in 1819, was a Connecticut Yankee who passed up college to work as a "captain's boy" on a steamship line. Henry Morrison Flagler was a Presbyterian minister's son, born in 1830 in New York state and raised in Ohio. From middle-class beginnings, both men achieved great wealth, Plant as a railroad owner, Flagler as one of the founders of Standard Oil.

Both men were embodiments of the Gilded Age, a half century of prosperity and industrial progress in America that gave birth to powerful corporations, robber barons and conspicuous consumption. They understood the last well, both in practice and as a means for profit.

Braden writes, "Fantasy played a surprisingly prominent role in the development of the Gilded Age resort hotel -- as, indeed, it played an important part in the era's cultural life and taste." From the grand whimsies of Newport, R.I., to the "rustic" camps of the Adirondacks, exotic architecture offered wealthy Americans a stage upon which to re-create themselves. Resort hotels offered such stages to a larger group, those not rich enough to build their own getaways but affluent enough to enjoy the hotels.

Plant, Braden writes, began to travel to Europe in the 1860s and developed a taste for European culture, especially architecture, and luxury hotels. Some 20 years later, when he began to extend his rails into Florida, building hotels seemed a logical sideline.

In 1886, Plant built a huge wharf in Port Tampa, then 9 miles from the city. Along with warehouses, docks and tracks, it featured the Inn at Port Tampa, a hotel about 2,000 feet from shore where travelers awaiting their trains and steamships could sleep, dine and even fish from the windows of their rooms.

[Photo: Henry B. Plant Museum] Plant’s Tampa Bay Hotel opened in 1891. Many of the resort’s other structures have been torn down, but the main building is part of the University of Tampa campus.

The Inn's first simple building, Braden writes, "owed much to local Florida residential architecture." But a second one hinted at Plant's bent toward dressing up for tourists, with fashionable Queen Anne style bay windows and balconies.

Plant's next hotel went way beyond hints. Construction of the Tampa Bay Hotel began in 1888. The 500-room resort opened in 1891, built and lavishly furnished at a then-staggering cost of $2.5-million.

The hotel made headlines across the country not just for its price tag but for its extravagant, exotic style, Braden writes, "variously labeled Moorish, Spanish, Islamic, Arabic, Mohammedan, Saracenic, Byzantine, Persian, Hindoo and Oriental."

In other words, architect James Wood wasn't much interested in "local Florida residential architecture." The building, with its 13 silver minarets, onion domes and horseshoe arches, looked as if it belonged in an Arabian Nights tale rather than in a still-scruffy riverside town, until then best known for its yellow fever outbreaks.

The hotel had ballrooms, parlors, elegant dining rooms and wide verandas; the grounds offered botanical gardens, hunting, fishing, boating, swimming, bowling, a theater and a casino. And Plant's railroad delivered the guests: first society folk and a few years later Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders, on their way to Cuba.

Today the Tampa Bay Hotel is the main building of the University of Tampa campus and the city's most recognizable structure. Its expansive grounds pared away, hemmed in by skyscrapers and dormitories, it's still a dash of magic across the relentlessly unmagical face of downtown Tampa.

Plant's other bay area hotel still stands as well. The Hotel Belleview, opened in 1897 in Belleair, veered off on an entirely different tack for architectural inspiration. On a beachfront site ridged with dunes, Plant built a Swiss chalet with pointed gables and overhanging roofs, a style, Braden writes, "associated with festivity and with the out-of-doors."

The Belleview was one of the earliest Florida resorts to feature that now-ubiquitous leashing of nature: a golf course. Its first putting greens were made of crushed shell, but by 1915 guests could play on two 18-hole courses. Plant's only son, Morton, ran the hotel until it was sold in 1919. It is now the Belleview Biltmore Resort and Spa, run by an Atlanta corporation.

Plant had staked out his territory and would own several other hotels in Central and South Florida. When he opened the Tampa Bay Hotel, he couldn't resist tweaking Flagler, a sometime business partner, by inviting him to the grand opening.

Flagler waggishly wired Plant, "Where's Tampa?"

"Follow the crowds," his rival wired back.

'Flagler's Folly'

When Flagler, already in his mid-fifties, decided to build his first hotel, the lavish 450-room Ponce de Leon in St. Augustine, he was so fabulously wealthy he didn't need to do anything. "For the last 14 or 15 years," he told a reporter, "I have devoted my time exclusively to business, and now I am pleasing myself."

But the venture made national news -- Flagler's status was equal to his partner John D. Rockefeller's -- and set off the first great Florida real estate boom. It also launched Flagler into a second career: developing the east coast of Florida.

[Photo: Florida State Archives] Flagler’s ornate Ponce de Leon Hotel opened in St. Augustine in 1888. This “ladies’ entry” was decorated with a two-story terra cotta grille.

His genius for business, which combined attention to the tiniest detail with a gift for imagining sweeping plans, was perfectly suited to the task at hand. He discovered he loved building luxury hotels; for Plant it was an extension of his main business, but for Flagler it became a passion.

The Ponce de Leon, designed by the New York firm of Carriere and Hastings, opened in 1888. The $2.5-million hotel covered 6 acres. Its grandly ornate exterior style was 16th century Spanish Renaissance, a reflection of the period in which St. Augustine was founded. Its lush interior was embellished with murals, marble and Tiffany glass. Flagler soon built a second hotel nearby, the Alcazar, and purchased and remodeled a third, Hotel Cordova.

Brochures and ads promoting Flagler's hotels and railroad depict glamorous couples and attentive staff surrounded by exotic architecture. One 1904 illustration boasts, "The East Coast of Florida is paradise regained."

The St. Augustine hotels were a sensation -- until Flagler outdid himself. He moved himself and his railroad down the coast, shifted his taste from the exuberant Spanish style to the classic Colonial Revival and, with the Hotel Royal Poinciana, the Palm Beach Inn and the Breakers, turned the sleepy burg of Palm Beach into society's winter playground.

With those hotels and similar ones he built farther south, Flagler went Plant one better. He not only developed resort hotels, he began to wield the 20th century concept of branding. The hotels were designed in a trademark style, painted the same colors (which also were used for the railroad) and used interchangeable linens and dishes.

It meant economy of scale, but it was also a huge stride in marketing: offering guests the luxury and fantasy of the resort along with the sense of security of knowing what to expect from a Flagler hotel.

Flagler spent more than $40-million of his personal fortune on his Florida projects -- he liked to say, "I would have been a rich man if it hadn't been for Florida" -- and got all kinds of cooperation from a state grateful for his economic contributions. His second wife, Ida, suffered increasingly from mental illness during the 1890s. In 1901, after moving to Florida, Braden writes, "and essentially paying the Florida legislature to create a bill allowing insanity as grounds for divorce, 74-year-old Flagler divorced his institutionalized wife and married 34-year-old Mary Lily Kenan."

It was as a wedding gift for Mary Lily that Flagler built Whitehall, the 55-room estate that cemented Palm Beach's status as a winter colony for high society.

If such resorts as the Tampa Bay Hotel and the Ponce de Leon created a fantasy world for tourists that insulated them from contact with the natural Florida, Flagler's final project would defy nature. The Key West Extension of the Florida East Coast Railway, a.k.a. "Flagler's Folly," took seven years to build, crossed 153 miles of open ocean and was a more complex feat of engineering than the Panama Canal. It cost Flagler more than $20-million, and it cost more than 140 workers their lives.

Standiford writes compellingly in Last Train to Paradise about the project's enormous difficulties: clearing and filling miles of wild swamp and scrub, creating bridges that would withstand water and wind, all in a race against the clock to finish in time to let the aging Flagler "ride his own iron" to Key West.

A major challenge was recruiting and retaining a huge work force in the natural conditions the tourist brochures didn't talk about. The thousands of men who built the railroad were not only isolated for months at a time; they dealt each day with heat, humidity, storms, snakes, gators and incorrigible mosquitoes.

Standiford relates how one visitor to a work camp in the Keys wrote of fleeing the clouds of mosquitoes by anchoring a mile and a half offshore (a luxury the workers didn't have). When that didn't deter the little bloodsuckers, he covered himself with two blankets -- only to find the skeeters biting him from below, right through his canvas cot.

But Flagler's dream never wavered, and his passion inspired the men who ran the project for him. One of them, his chief engineer Joseph Meredith, died in 1909 from complications of diabetes, a condition he had kept secret in order to stay on the job. The railroad was finished in 1912, and Flagler, 82, rode it to Key West for an elaborate celebration. He died a little more than a year later.

Standiford frames the epic of the railroad's building with the vividly rendered story of its destruction. On Sept. 2, 1935, about 23 years after Flagler's railroad was completed, a Category 5 hurricane, the strongest ever to hit the United States, tore through the Keys. It destroyed all but one 60-foot section of 153 miles of track. Seven-hundred people died.

Nature had slipped its leash.

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