The ornate entrance to the Vinoy Park in St. Petersburg a few years after it opened in 1925. For 16 years, it reigned as the Tampa Bay area’s most renowned hotel; then came the attack on Pearl Harbor, which turned out to be a disaster for the hotel as well as the country.
Once the most famous address in St. Petersburg, the old hotel had been closed for 18 years. In the public rooms where well-heeled guests had strutted, vagrants, vandals and the homeless now found a temporary refuge. On winter nights, squatters would light a bonfire on the glazed tile flooring, while in the ballroom local kids played volleyball where couples had once danced to the music of Paul Whiteman. Young lovers, it is said, would hold romantic trysts in the empty bedrooms.
In 1985, it was announced that the hotel was going to be torn down. When protests began to mount, a referendum was held and the voters of St. Petersburg, who remembered the Vinoy Park when it was the social hub of their city, voted overwhelmingly to restore rather than destroy.
Twelve groups tried in vain to raise the financing needed to pay for the renovation. The 13th group proved luckier–or perhaps smarter. Developer Frederick Guest II had been in the running to get the contract for the restoration of the Boca Raton Hotel & Club; when that failed he decided to try for the Vinoy instead. Realizing that the S&L crisis and a mid-1980s change in tax code had soured U.S. financiers on large renovation loans, Guest headed to Europe where he arranged funding through Barclays Bank of England and Credit Lyonnais of France. He then persuaded the Stouffer hotel chain to ante up another $5 million, in return for which they would be given the management of the new hotel.
Read the entire article in the February 2007 issue
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