Category: hotels
As I strolled Hollywood's Broadwalk yesterday it occurred to me that the people who are opposed to the new mega-Margaritaville are the same sorts of people the resort's creator used to glorify in his songs.
Driving up Federal Highway the other day I noticed that the old abandoned hotel at the corner of Dania Beach Boulevard had been torn down. When I expressed regret, Hania wondered why, asking if the building had been particularly attractive.
It wasn't. It was an undistinguished, three- or four-story block. But passing it you thought of its past, the people who stayed there, the dramas that took place within its walls. A nondescript building - especially a hotel - is still evocative, while a vacant lot is simply vacant.
Friday I returned to the new Marriott Marquis for lunch, during which the mayor of Miami spoke. "You are doing more than opening a hotel," he said of J.W. Marriott Jr. "You are opening a window of hope that things will be better for Miami and South Florida."
Jeez, I thought, it's just a hotel. But then I remembered the photographs I'd seen out in the hall. They were old black-and-white shots of Henry Flagler's The Royal Palms Hotel, which stood on the site of the new Marriott. Flagler, railroad man turned hotelier, was the father of modern Florida, a state where hotels are more than just lodgings, they are our most historic, aesthetic and iconic structures. The Breakers. The Biltmore. The Vinoy. The Casa Monica. Hotels are to Florida what chateaus are to France. And, unlike in France, we keep building them.
Models held trays of cocktails and tables groaned with food - pates, cheeses, shellfish, smoked fish, suckling pig - at the grand opening of the Marriott Marquis in downtown Miami last night. Sometimes it's fun to pretend there's no recession.
I carried my glass of Champagne into the bar - feeling not at all like a struggling freelancer - and sat next to a couple from Miami Beach. "It's a different crowd here than in South Beach," Elsa observed.
"In what way?" I asked.
"More breasts and ass over there," she said. "Here people are wearing clothes."
A little after eight the models began walking around with illuminated signs that read: "Come play with us on the 19th floor." I didn't get too excited, because I knew from a tour of the hotel a few weeks earlier that the 19th floor held a full-length basketball court. I took the elevator up and the space that had looked quite impressive on the tour now resembled a high school gym that had been decorated for the junior prom. (Except for the bar set up at one end.)
Elsa showed me her new camera and then left me and Brian as she went off to take pictures. Minutes later she returned with one of Anna Kournikova. Then she was gone again. When she got back, she showed us a close-up of Alex Rodriguez.
"Do you ask if you can take their pictures?" I asked.
"No. I use the zoom. I'm bad," she said laughing.
As the court filled, Brian noticed an increase in people who were "surgically enhanced."
Venus Williams was introduced, but she didn't take part in the foul shooting contest, conducted by Tim Hardaway. I said goodbye to my new friends and, about mid-court, ran into Sara, whom I'd met on the tour.
"What do you think?" I asked her.
"It's the best Bar Mitzvah I've ever been to," she said.
Starting today, I am offering my services to hotels as a writer-in-residence.
These are tough times for writers as well as for hotels (see below) so wouldn't it make sense if we joined forces? How many times have you stayed in a wonderful hotel and thought: This place is great, but I wish they had a writer on call.
That's where I come in. I will sit at a desk in the lobby, working on my blog, articles, books. But I will be ready to stop in the middle of a sentence to help guests with postcards, e-mails, memoirs, tweets. (Travel writers have a way with postcards.) I will share great leads. I will edit gently. I will make myself available for drinks in the bar.
Every hotel is trying to find the next new thing that will distinguish it from its competitors. This is it. Imagine coming home from a trip and telling your friends that your hotel had a writer. (People are so tired of hearing about spas.) Even if you didn't make use of the services, your vacation was enriched by the sight of someone in the throes of literary creation.
Of course, a writer-in-residence is not for every hotel. I don't see it working at the Fountainebleau, or the Delano. But surely the Biltmore, the Raleigh, the Breakers, the Ritz.
I await their calls.
The Florida House Inn in Fernandina Beach, Florida's "oldest operating hotel," is, according to the Herald, no longer operating. The owners have reportedly placed a "closed" sign on the door.
This is very sad news. Though the Biltmore in Coral Gables stood vacant for a number of years in the 90s, and then bounced back to life.
The Florida House Inn deserves the same fate. Built in Vernacular "Cracker" style in 1857, it adds immeasurably to the charm of the town, with its wooden fretwork balconies hung with flags. I stayed there once, in the room that Jose Marti had slept in. I remember creaking floorboards and an old-fashioned bed and an ambiance you don't very often get in Florida.
Returning a couple years later for the Amelia Book Island Festival, I had drinks in the inn courtyard with a few other writers. Sipping her wine, a middle-aged Southern poet remembered when the drinking and driving ban became law. "We thought that was crazy," she said. "I mean, how are you supposed to get home from the bar?"