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Vintage Pinellas: The Belleview Biltmore
Connecticut’s Henry B. Plant was the late 19th century visionary who saw the potential in Florida’s west coast as a magnet for wealthy northerners seeking respite from winter freezes. Another Henry – this one named Flagler – built the pioneering East Coast Railway, linking Jacksonville and Miami, and Peter Demens brought the Orange Belt Railway to the Pinellas peninsula.
It was Plant, however, who extended the Orange Belt and sent spurs westward, making the coastline accessible.
In 1898, Success magazine dubbed him “The King of Florida.”
There was money, and plenty of it, to be made by servicing visitors, and Plant constructed eight grand hotels between Tampa and Punta Gorda, each of them conveniently reached by his rail lines.
One of the grandest was the Belleview Hotel, a 145-room, 78,000-square-foot wooden “wilderness lodge,” built in the Queen Anne style on the tall bluffs overlooking remote Clearwater Harbor. A dedicated rail delivered vacationers from the station in Tampa to the Belleview’s front door.
Circa 1914 postcard image, after the third extension.
Sports heroes, celebrities, business tycoons, even American presidents enjoyed the amenities and spacious grounds; between January and April, they and their families swam at the private beach, played golf and croquet on the private green grass, rode bicycles on a curvy brick racetrack, went on Gulf fishing excursions and otherwise gamboled footloose and worry-free in the sun.
Southbound trains and shining automobiles bring a stream of distinguished people to the hotel, this parade of splendor continuing from the opening day, usually the first Saturday in January, to the close of the season three months later.
St. Petersburg Times/Nov. 16, 1930
The private rail cars that dropped off guests named Vanderbilt, DuPont and Carnegie were stored until it was time to go back home come springtime. At one time, according to legend, there were 15 of these luxury railcars parked and waiting.
Photo: Florida Archives.
Guest cottages, upper-level staff homes and a three-story employee dormitory were constructed on site. Hidden stairways and dumbwaiters ensured guests wouldn’t have to see staff scurrying about.
What was then the western part of Hillsborough County was mostly wilderness, with small settlements here and there. The town of Belleair was conceived, and grew up, around Plant’s opulent wooden palace.
After the rail and leisure tycoon died, Plant’s son Morton managed the hotel until his own death in 1919; he’s credited with the color scheme – white buildings with green roofs – that remained for nearly a century. It was during Morton Plant’s 20-year tenure that locals began to refer to the gabled Belleview as “The White Queen of the Gulf.”
Photo: Town of Belleair.
By 1924, the inn had been expanded four times, to 455 rooms and 340,000 square feet. The kitchen and dining rooms were enlarged; the two golf courses (designed by greens legend Donald J. Ross) came to include 36 holes. The Starlight Ballroom was added for concerts, recitals, balls and dancing.
The Belleview was sold to the Biltmore Hotel Corporation in 1925, at almost the exact time still-tiny St. Petersburg was getting its first resort hotels, the Vinoy Park, the Ponce de Leon and the Soreno (the world-famous Don CeSar didn’t rise until 1928).
The Biltmore Corporation lost everything in the stock market crash of 1929; the inn passed into receivership, then to new owners.
As the Belleview Biltmore, it thrived, more or less, throughout the century; by 1970, at 820,000 square feet and 380 rooms, it held the record as the country’s longest continually occupied wooden structure. Wall unit air conditioning was added during the 1972-73 season, although it wasn’t until 1986 that the Belleview Biltmore opened for summer visitors.
Photo: Town of Belleair.
By then, however, the ravages of time, human back-and-forth and (particularly) the Gulf Coast weather had taken their toll.
After changing owners a few more times, the Belleview Biltmore closed in 2009. Seven years later, after extensive physical inspections and hardline fiscal evaluations, it was decided that the majority of the old buildings were unsalvageable. Amid outcry from locals, preservationists and historians, 90 percent of the structure was demolished.
“If you had seen that hotel at that time, it was a mess,” explained developer Mike Cheezem, whose JMC Communities purchased the Belleview Biltmore in 2015. “Standing water, mold and vermin – literally, foxes were coming and going. And it was a big eyesore – but also a beloved building that so many people in the community were connected with.”
1983 photo: Florida Archives.
As the decades passed, property between the inn and Clearwater Harbor had been sold off for condominiums and housing. So the unobstructed views of the harbor – and of the barrier island where Clearwater Beach had been developed, its massive buildings now shaping the horizon – were no more.
“Practically speaking,” Cheezem recalled, “we knew we could not renovate the entire hotel. There was no way it was anywhere near economically feasible, given all the competition on the beach, and it was now a landlocked property.”
The company announced plans to erect a “a replacement hotel that would look like it had the character of the old inn” at the center of an entirely modern community, and modest groundswell opposition turned into a roar of protest.
A revised plan – to restore the original 1897 hotel lobby (which was in surprisingly good shape) and 35 of its adjoining rooms – was unanimously approved by the Bellair Town Commission, and the local historical board.
2016. Photo: The Hudson Company.
“We felt that by saving the most historical and beautiful piece of the hotel, we could make it work,” Cheezem said. “That it would add value to our community, as well as to the community as a whole.”
The plans for JMC’s Belleview Inn called for this central building, 300 by 96 feet, and 62 feet high – to be relocated approximately 320 feet to the east.
On Dec. 21, 2016, JMC spent just under one million dollars to hoist the 1,750-ton structure up on 47 hydraulic dollies and roll it to a newly-poured concrete foundation. Moving at 0.25 miles per hour, the journey took four hours.
Moving day, 2016. Photo: Wiki Commons.
Nearly half a million board feet of 19th century heart of pine had been salvaged when the other buildings were taken down. The sturdy, termite-resistant planks – hewn from Henry Plant’s own tree farms in Florida and Georgia – were de-nailed, and those in the best condition were reclaimed. Many were used to re-construct the lobby flooring and other areas as the building’s renovation progressed.
Also salvaged were crossbeams, windows and frames, knobs and other metal door pieces, to be restored and re-used in the “new” hotel.
The fully-restored Belleview Inn opened as a boutique hotel in 2018; JMC constructed the adjacent Belleview Place condominiums, and the Palm Terrace carriage homes, and re-configured sections of Belleview Boulevard, the main thoroughfare in. The golf courses are owned and operated by the Bellair Country Club.
The renovated dining room retails the original Tiffany glass ceiling panes from Plant’s era, each painstakingly restored.
The old hotel’s rich history was never far from developer Cheezem’s thoughts as the grounds were cleared and the bulldozers moved. During the excavation, “we actually found segments of the old train tracks going into the old hotel,” he said. “Which was pretty amazing.”
A few historic dates
A 1930s photo shows Babe Ruth with hotel golf pro Edmund F. O’Connor (left) Photo: Town of Belleair.
1895: Henry Plant buys the Orange Belt Railway from Peter Demens.
1897: The Belleview Hotel opens (Jan. 15).
1899: Henry Plant dies.
1899: Colonel Harry Yocum, who lives in Sunset Cottage on the Belleview grounds, takes his teenage daughter Florence and her two besties on a cruise about the yacht Paul Jones, down the Mississippi River from St. Louis and across the Gulf of Mexico to Belleair, where the girls were to “come out” at a debutante ball during the winter season. On New Year’s Eve, the vessel, which also carried a three-man crew, left New Orleans … and disappeared. One of the teens was the daughter of powerful Indianapolis mayor and party boss Thomas Taggert. Forensic examination of debris discovered on Louisiana’s Breton Island led authorities to deduce the yacht’s engine had somehow exploded. There were no survivors.
1919: Morton Plant dies.
1933: On the 16th tee in the second round of the Belleair Amateur Golf Championship, Babe Ruth drives his ball into a shock of palmetto bushes and scrub, resulting in a mad dash by “millionaires and citrus farmers” (according to the St. Petersburg Times) to locate it, to no avail. Ruth – who had given the ball an extra-strong wallop in an attempt to move up from second place – loses to D.N. Tallman. Headlines the Times: “Bam’s Ball Blows.”
1942: The hotel and grounds are leased, for one year, to the U.S. Army Air Corps as auxiliary barracks for airmen stationed in Tampa, and for use as drill grounds for thousands of medical technician trainees.
1953: The Duke of Windsor, accompanied by “two little dogs,” but not the Duchess, arrives at the Biltmore in mid-February for two weeks’ R&R. He was still in Florida when word came that his mother, Queen Mary, had died.
1972: Air conditioning is added (via individual wall units).
April 22, 1976: Bob Dylan performs for invited guests in the Starlight Ballroom. The performance is filmed for a TV special; although this photo was taken at the Belleview Biltmore, the Florida-made program never aired.
1976: Bob Dylan and his Rolling Thunder Revue encamp at the Belleview Biltmore to rehearse for their upcoming tour. In the Starlight Ballroom – ground zero for nearly 80 years of social events, luncheons and recitals – Dylan, Joan Baez and company perform two concerts for an invited audience, for an NBC-TV special that never materializes. Read the full story here.
1979: Added to the National Register of Historic Places.
1986: The hotel opens year-round for the first time. The golf courses and tennis courts (constructed in the 1970s) are purchased by the Belleair Country Club, Inc.
1990: The Japanese corporation Mido buys the hotel and adds a restaurant, a spa, a new pool and a large Oriental-style pagoda in front of the Victorian-era lobby building. Business begins to precipitously fall off.
2008: Presidential candidate Barack Obama spends several days at the Belleview Biltmore in September, while preparing for an upcoming debate with his opponent, John McCain, at the University of Mississippi. According to Belleview lore, Presidents Reagan, Ford, Carter and George H.W. Bush had either stayed at the hotel, or played golf.
2016: New owner JMC Communities demolishes the east and west wings, all outbuildings and the Mido pagoda. In December, the original lobby building, with 35 attached rooms, is relocated 320 feet to the east as the centerpiece of the Belleview Inn. Because of this, the Belleview Biltmore is removed from the National Register of Historic Places.
The Belleview Inn today. Photo: JMC.
