Paradise for Sale

by Nick Wynne

  The men and women who are buying Palma Ceia lots (for low prices of $500 to $800) will have cause for congratulations before the summer is over. The opening of the Palma Ceia Golf Course and new country club in August will enhance the value of all the land in the surrounding territory. People of wealth and leisure will build around the course.

  The ad was truthful, and today Palma Ceia remains one of the most exclusive residential areas in Tampa.

  To the northeast of Tampa, Temple Terrace beckoned as a mecca for golfing fanatics. In 1914, the Potter Palmer family of Chicago purchased much of this area and used the land as a winter hunting preserve. In 1921, after the death of Beatrice Palmer, the family sold the property to William E. Hamner. Hamner turned around and sold the property to a syndicate led by his brother, Burt Hamner, and his partners, D. Collins Gillette and Vance Helm. This syndicate then formed two corporations. The first, Temple Terraces, Inc., controlled approximately four thousand acres north of Druid Hills Road and dedicated it to the production of the Temple orange, a new variety of orange that the group was anxious to market. The second company, Temple Terraces Estates, planned to build a residential community centered on a fabulous golf resort. The estates included about seven hundred acres bordered by Druid Hills Road on the north, the Hillsborough River on the east, Riverhills Drive on the south and Fifty-sixth Street on the west. Actually, the developers hoped that these two ventures could be combined by selling both homes and grove plots to wealthy retirees. The citrus would provide an annual income, while the couples enjoyed the activities at the country club. By 1925, enough homes had been constructed for the builders to initiate municipal incorporation proceedings, which received the approval of the state legislature in May 1925.

  The Temple Terrace Golf and Country Club course was designed and built in 1921 by the renowned architect Tom Bendelow, who had designed the course at Palma Ceia. The club officially opened in 1922, and that is the date carried on the club’s logo today. Few of the homes constructed in the Temple Terrace development had kitchens, and residents were expected to take all their meals in the clubhouse restaurant.

  Temple Terrace was also home to the Morocco Club, which was completed in 1925. Built in two sections in the manner of Moorish architecture, it had elaborate tiling in the foyer, and the ceiling of the main building was draped with bright-colored silk in thick folds. At the center of the rear wall in the foyer was a mummy case supposedly imported from Egypt. A huge fireplace and a sunken pool occupied prominent spots in the back of the main building, which led to an Olympic-sized swimming pool. A small room on the second floor also served as a gambling casino. All kinds of gambling games could be found with huge sums of money won and lost in a single evening. Evening dress was required of guests. Evening entertainment at the Morocco Club, which featured nightly dining on squab and pheasant, was primarily dancing in the main part of the club. Once billed as the most luxurious nightclub on the west coast of Florida, the Morocco Club catered to high rollers who sipped champagne and filled the dance floor. It was not unusual for the orchestra to receive fifty dollars for playing a single request. Al Jolson and many other famous entertainers of the day performed there.

  With the collapse of the Florida boom in the late 1920s, the development of Temple Terrace came to a screeching halt. Although the orange groves planned by the original developers continued to be productive for several decades, much of the property was sold to other parties and converted to other uses. The Florida Bible Institute, now known as Florida College, utilizes parts of the property for classrooms and dormitories. Famed evangelist Billy Graham attended the institute and, so the legend goes, decided on his career path while meditating on the eighteenth green one night in 1939.

  To the southeast of Tampa in Manatee County, the Palmetto Golf and Country Club opened on February 23, 1925, at the very height of the Florida boom. Surrounded by the upscale Palmetto Country Club Estates, the course, designed by the firm of Wayne Stiles and John Van Kleek, was described as one of the most difficult in Florida. Despite the widespread support by the local business community, the club could not winter the devastating effects of the bust of the late 1920s. Sold and reopened several times in the next three decades, the property eventually became a drive-in theatre.

  Mount Plymouth in Lake County was another golf project that involved Carl Dann Sr. The enormous clubhouse and hotel was designed to have four separate courses extending from it. Because of the bust in Florida real estate sales in 1926–27, only one course was actually constructed. Courtesy of the Florida Historical Society.

  In Lake County, a group of business and professional sports figures joined together to create a year-round golf and recreation complex on the site of the five-thousand-acre Pirie cattle ranch. Carl Dann Sr., the developer of the Dubsdread course and the Golfview Terrace subdivision, led the group, which included such noted figures as Connie Mack and Joe Tinker of baseball fame; Lester Beeman, who owned a chewing gum corporation; and Graves Whitmire, who owned two Chicago newspapers. In 1925, architects were commissioned to draw up plans for a 150-room hotel to be at the center of four golf courses, patterned after the greatest courses in the world. Christened Mount Plymouth to avoid confusion with the nearby community of Plymouth in Orange County, Sam Stoltz, a noted Chicago architect, was hired to design unique houses to border the courses. Basing his designs on the Tudor Revival style, he worked to create a fairyland of castles, houses and smaller cottages.

  The bust of 1926 and 1927 curtailed the ambitious plans of the club’s founders, and three of the projected four courses were never built. The club survived, however, largely due to the unique decision by its incorporators to take a portion of the money received for each lot sale and create an endowment that would pay for the upkeep of the course, clubhouse and other facilities.

  One of the earliest golf developments in Florida was the Pasadena Golf Club, the brainchild of Jack Taylor of New York. Realizing that golf was a surefire magnet to draw residents to his subdivision, he hired Wayne Stiles and John Van Kleek to create a tournament-quality course under the supervision of “Sir” Walter Hagen. Hagen, who was recognized as the premier professional golfer of the era, served as resident professional and president of the club for an annual salary of $30,000, an astronomical figure for the period. Originally named the Bear Creek Golf Course, the name was changed to the more exclusive-sounding Pasadena Golf Club to lure members who were more affluent. Although ground was broken for a large clubhouse in 1924, the large salary the club paid to Hagen and the collapse of Florida’s economy in 1926 prevented its completion until 1939. Nevertheless, the Pasadena Golf Club attracted a number of wealthy members, primarily because of Hagen’s presence; that is, until the full effect of the bust took hold. By 1928, the course had become an unweeded pasture presided over by wild animals that immediately reclaimed it.

  In 1929, Dixie Hollins, a wealthy attorney in St. Petersburg, purchased the property and reopened it under the name the Pasadena Yacht and Country Club. Walter Hagen was again hired to head the operation. From 1930 until 1964, the club, along with the Lakewood Golf Club (a municipal course that opened on Thanksgiving Day 1924) and the Sunset Golf Club of the Vinoy Park Hotel as co-hosts, was the scene of the St. Petersburg Open tournament.

  In 1925, Aymer Vinoy Laughner, the son of a Pennsylvania oil millionaire, entered the Florida land boom with plans to create a luxury hotel on the banks of Tampa Bay in St. Petersburg. The result was the Vinoy Park Hotel, a Mediterranean Revival structure that was the largest hotel in the city. As part of the hotel property, Laughner affiliated his hotel with the Coffee Pot Golf Course, which was being built by C. Perry Snell, who was developing a high-end residential development on the aptly named Snell Island. There is some doubt as to who designed the original Coffee Pot course, although two of America’s top course designers worked in the area. Arthur W. Tillinghast is a likely suspect because he had designed the course for Walter Fuller’s Jungle Club, although there are those who credit Don
ald J. Ross with its design since he had been responsible for several other courses in the area, including two courses for the Belleview Biltmore Hotel in Belleair/Clearwater. In 1926, William Hickman Diddel was commissioned to reconstruct a new eighteen-hole golf course on the property, which included the Coffee Pot Golf Course. This new course was named Sunset Golf & Country Club.

  The Vinoy Hotel and Snell Island were favorites of wealthy families in the Philadelphia area and New York, and the list of prominent individuals who purchased homes on Snell Island reads like a Fortune 500 listing of the day. Babe Ruth, Herbert Hoover, Calvin Coolidge and countless other well-known people visited the hotel and played the course.

  In 1932, Snell sold the golf course and clubhouse for $156,000 to D.L. Clark, the candy maker, along with twenty-four building lots. Clark owned a home in Snell’s original development, in addition to other properties in St. Petersburg valued at more than $1 million. He continued to operate the course—with the exception of several years during World War II, when the hotel and the course were used as military training facilities—until 1948, when it was sold to the Alsonett Hotel Group.

  In nearby Polk County, a group of “snowbirds,” led by Pulitzer Prize– winner Edward Bok, purchased the property of William J. Howey and developed a small golfing community known as Mountain Lakes Estates. The course, designed by Seth Raynor, was considered one of the most playable in the Sunshine State. In 1921, Bok commissioned Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. to design a garden “second to none in the country” as the setting for a 205-foot tower containing sixty bells. In Sebring, George Sebring built the Kenilworth Lodge in 1916. The facility featured a twenty-seven-hole golf course and 117 rooms and was easily accessible to northern visitors via the Seaboard Air Line Railroad. Construction began on Harder Hall in Sebring, another golf-oriented tourist hotel, at the height of the Florida boom in 1925. It was completed and opened to the public in 1927, just as the bust was becoming widespread. Like the Kenilworth Lodge, Harder Hall was built because of the nearby railroad stop. Every new hotel and resort touted newly constructed golf courses as its main feature. Even the small beach community of Indialantic, promoted by developer Ernest Kouwen-Hoven, boasted of the Indialantic Hotel and Golf Club and its new course.

  At the beginning of the 1920s, Vero was a small town that had barely been in existence for ten years and had been incorporated for only a year. Yet despite its newness, Vero immediately attracted the attention of prominent northerners looking for an ideal location for winter homes. In 1919, three Cleveland, Ohio residents—Dr. J.P. Sawyer, Edgar Strong and Dr. W.H. Humiston—purchased 160 acres of land on the barrier island directly across the Indian River Lagoon from the small mainland community of Vero. Separated by the Indian River from the mainland, the property, first known as Southern Dunes, would become one of the most exclusive enclaves in the Sunshine State, restricted to families that met the social and financial standards of the original founders. Quickly, the founders began to build large homes—most without kitchens—in the development. Residents took their meals at the clubhouse, which was completed in 1919. Arthur McKee, a prominent local promoter a few years later, was the first guest to stay in the clubhouse and built the first home in the development in 1919. Six additional homes were soon finished. Among the first homes constructed that year was “Orchid Oaks,” built by New York attorney Winchester Fitch, who suggested that the community’s name be changed to the Riomar Country Club, a combination of the Spanish words for river and sea.

  The newly built Indialantic Hotel boasted an adjacent golf course. Developer Ernest Kouwen-Hoven created his development to meet a demand from the American middle class for modestly priced homes in the Sunshine State. Courtesy of the Moorhead Collection.

  Alex McWilliams was hired to supervise the construction of a clubhouse and a nine-hole golf course, which was designed by Herbert Strong. The new clubhouse, built in 1929, had room for seventy-eight guests and served as a residential facility for the many visitors who came to the development. The clubhouse was the center of activity for the development, and each evening residents of the community would gather there for cocktails, despite the fact that Prohibition was the law of the land. Eventually, ownership of the Riomar Club passed into the control of Paul K. Semon and the Riomar Corporation, who sold it in 1965 to St. Edwards School.

  The Riomar Club got its start in the early 1920s and maintained a nine-hole golf course until 1963. It was a very exclusive development in Vero Beach, which “was a community of professionals in the early days. First people from Cleveland came, then those from New York and then Chicago. Mostly they were people who knew each other and heard about Riomar through word-of-mouth.” Courtesy of the Moorhead Collection.

  In 1920, the private nine-hole golf course was completed, and residents could add this sport to swimming in the Atlantic Ocean, tennis and fishing. The course had the distinction of being the only course between Daytona and Palm Beach. On an inspection tour of the newly constructed Intracoastal Canal in 1921, President-elect Warren G. Harding, who was also from Ohio, was persuaded to play a round of golf on the new course. Harding’s visit to Riomar added to the prestige of the development, and the demand for property there accelerated, but this demand was not met. The original nine-hole course was expanded to eighteen holes in 1963, and membership in the Riomar Country Club was opened to individuals who were not property owners in the original Riomar development.

  Vero Beach was very much an active and attractive participant in the Florida land boom that swept across the United States in the 1920s, but when the boom collapsed in 1926–27, the Royal Palm development and the Vero Beach Golf and Country Club fell on hard times. Without a constant stream of eager new purchasers to buy homes, memberships in the club dwindled. When the Great Depression followed the bust a mere two years later, the great influx of new buyers came to a screeching halt.

  Whitfield Estates in Sarasota, which opened in 1926, featured a championship course designed by Donald J. Ross, who also designed the course for Pinecrest in Avon Park. Pinecrest also opened in 1926. Ross was a prolific designer in the 1920s, and his name was enough to draw golfers from around the world. The San Jose Golf Club in Jacksonville, which opened in 1925, featured his design. So, too, did the Timuquana Country Club, which was chartered in 1923, as well as the Jacksonville Municipal Golf Course, later known as Brentwood and which no longer exists. All of these courses had one thing in common—they were lures to bring tourists and homebuyers to the Sunshine State. Municipalities in Florida, eager to gain their shares of the tourist trade and just as eager to demonstrate their desirability as places for permanent residents, climbed on board the golf bandwagon. Sunshine and beaches were simply not enough.

  CHAPTER 12

  Shut Your Damn Mouth!

  One of the biggest problems with which Florida is at present concerned is that of “truth in advertising,” and truth in the news which comes or purports to come from Florida. While it cannot be said of our people that they have been backward in proclaiming the advantages of their State to the rest of the world, neither can it justly be said that the advertising, news and magazine publicity emanating officially or quasi-officially from Florida the State, or Florida communities, has ever been fanciful or untruthful.

  The position we take is that the truth about Florida is good enough. We are certain of the future of our State. In 1924 more than $450,000,000 of northern capital was put into permanent Florida holdings. Most of this capital was brought by individuals and corporations familiar with the State. There need be no concern on their account…We are concerned, however, for the small investor. It is his savings which the unscrupulous operator endeavors to obtain.

  —Herman A. Dann, President, Florida Chamber of Commerce, 1925

  Just when everything seemed to be going well for Florida developers, the bottom fell out. After two years of incessant trading in land titles, the upper limits of reason had been reached, and there was no place higher to go. Speculators who counted
on being able to resell properties repeatedly saw the frenetic and constantly churning land market suddenly turn calm. In northern newspapers, the first protests against the boom came when bankers, apprehensive about the loss of deposits to Florida banks, questioned the safety of investments in Florida developments and urged their customers to keep their funds in their banks. The Florida boom, they pronounced publicly, was over. When a New York sportswriter speculated in his column that the boom was dead, a Florida newspaper replied vehemently in an editorial: “Shut Your Damn Mouth!”

  Out-of-staters, long deluged by millions of fanciful words by the world’s greatest advertising experts, began to take notice of the negative reports and slowed their march to the Sunshine State. Their apprehensions seemed justified by several different occurrences that grabbed the headlines during the final six months of 1925. Overwhelmed by the large numbers of passengers coming to Florida and the large number of freight cars filled with building materials waiting to be unloaded in Miami and Jacksonville, the Florida East Coast Railroad imposed a moratorium on further shipments. Two thousand cars were parked in the railroad yard in Miami because neither warehouse space nor manual laborers was available to unload them and store the supplies. In Jacksonville’s Baldwin yard, an additional seven thousand or so rail cars clogged the rails. Only passengers, fuel, livestock and perishables were allowed on the rails. New construction came to a halt, and hundreds of projects already underway—large hotels, apartment buildings and individual homes—were left unfinished in the hot Florida sunshine. Prospective buyers, tourists and workers were unable to find enough housing, which exacerbated the desperate situation.