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Postcards from Irving Vol. 1 OUT NOW
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Tag Archives: florida
FROM THE ARCHIVES: Ben Irving Photos from Florida – A Gator and a Dolphin (and more on Marineland)
I scanned these photos with the impression that Irving took them both at Marineland, a marine life expo located on Highway A1A between St. Augustine and Daytona Beach. According to the manager behind Marineland’s social media accounts, the first photo (of a trainer with a gator) was not taken there, but the second photo, which features a dolphin jumping for a treat in a tank with spectators, absolutely was.
This certainly creates more questions about where Irving may have snapped a photo of a trainer with a Gator. I wonder if the St. Augustine area had any accessible “gator experiences” at the time. It may have been at Gatorland, which has been called such since 1954, but that was far down the road in Kissimmee.
Marineland, especially in the last two decades of Florida’s pre-Disney era, was a well-established attraction. The cover of the Marineland guide, which I’ve scanned into JPEG format and will share below, along with a few other highlights from the program, has become an enduring image of Florida’s pre-Mickey tourist trade.
The guide’s opening salvo is particularly interesting, especially because it begins with a reference to Mohammed. The reference was hardly inaccurate (given the can-do attitude that permeated throughout Florida’s post-war attractions), but something tells me a program for a popular tourist destination on Florida’s space coast (ghost to ghost) would not open with a Mohammed anytime this century.
Click to enlarge the above pages and check out their sales pitch to visitors! Read about how new and exciting Oceanariums were at the time. I’ve also cropped and enlarged the “Gull’s-eye” view of the park, which appears to be facing south, looking at the Porpoise Stadium under the Marineland sign.
It’s still difficult to tell exactly which of the Oceanariums (Oceanaria? …It’s not a word I tend to use much in conversation or writing) Irving’s photo of the clever jumping dolphin was taken in. The Porpoise School tank at the foot of those blue bleachers would make sense, but according to the program, the Circular Oceanarium had dolphin shows as well.
The Harvest of Hope Festival (2010): A Look Back
Generally speaking, I hate music festivals. On one level, they are often overwhelming, expensive, and somehow at least 4 of the 5 bands you came to see are scheduled concurrently. On another level, music festivals (particularly the big-money ones) have become cogent reminders of how inherently contradictory capitalism is toward all forms of art and meaning. A vast majority of festivals that attempt to remain pure in meaning and focus only survive for a couple of years. The Harvest of Hope Festival, which ran for a couple of years in St. Augustine, FL, was case in point.
As of this writing, the fest’s website still exists and provides a fascinating window into the internet of the early 2010’s. It originated as a benefit for the Harvest of Hope Foundation, a Gainesville-based 501(c)(3) devoted to raising awareness of the struggles faced by migrant workers. According to the Foundation’s standing Facebook page, the organization closed down in 2013. Thankfully, their work was not in vain, seeing how many activist groups online have picked up that mantle (one I recommend personally is @flowerinspanish on Instagram). Given how relatively short-lived the Festival was, you have to admire how they pulled off TWO three-day events given all the requisite red tape, booking costs, and finding a full lineup of artists willing to perform for free (or, for the headliners, significantly less than what they could pull in from a larger, for-profit festival). Then again, its important to keep in mind that in 2009-2010, festivals like Coachella and Bonnaroo were still in transition from regional concerns to bloated international garbage plates.
I don’t remember how I heard about the Harvest of Hope Festival, but it was probably somewhere on Facebook. Looking back at the lineup (which I’ve scanned and pasted below), there were only a handful of bands I would have gone out of my way to see. Many of the bands on the lineup were from Florida or adjacent states, and with few exceptions, the organizers put them in opening or closing spots.
Some of the names that jump out on this list in 2021 were little more than cult icons in 2010, especially Portugal. the Man, who was several years prior his major crossover hit “Feel It Still.” Others, like Broken Social Scene, are hard for me to gauge in that respect; I do remember seeing “Cause = Time” at 12:30 AM on MTV when they broke out in 2004 and they did a big tour with Belle & Sebastian in 2006, as much as Leslie Feist left the group in her dust by the end of the decade. Even a couple of the punk bands, namely The Menzingers and The Wonder Years, were featured here before growing into two of the most successful bands in their genre. Of course I missed both of their sets.
One of the best performances I saw the entire weekend was also one of the biggest surprises: Chali 2Na. I had been a casual fan of his since I first heard his booming, 7-foot verses on Jurassic 5 songs, but his set on Friday night had a panache to it. He opened with “International” and just locked into a groove that didn’t lift until he left the stage. Another highlight (which I imagine would make some hirsute, 90’s-loving readers’ eyes pop) was Leatherface, architects of the gruff pop-punk that Floridians like How Water Music would build careers on, as well as the authors of one of my favorite songs ever recorded. Frankie Stubbs, a UK national, seemed to be dealing with perpetual visa issues at that time, resulting in the cancellation of stateside dates that summer. I’ll never forget how viscerally angry he was with the security, whom he stridently labeled “the fun police,” ending his set with a loud “fuck you!” and storming off. Legendary Stubbs.
On Saturday afternoon, I skipped out on the festival to head down to Ocala to see a friend and meet her new baby daughter. It was a nice visit, as much as I missed Good Luck (whom I had interviewed for an issue of Razorcake the previous year) and a few other bands I would later learn of, including Dan Padilla and Too Many Daves, whose singer Dave (DeDominici) Disorder I wouldn’t meet until a decade later in a Tampa grocery store*.
Looking back at this unique moment in punk history has been fun, especially since it happened so early in the iPhone (2007) and Android (2008) timelines, so relatively little video evidence of this festival exists online. To my surprise, I found that YouTube user “stdruler” uploaded most of Paul Baribeau‘s set shortly after the festival. I don’t know what they used to film it; it could have been a cheap flip cam or some early smart-phone with a low-res video function built in. It’s great to be able to re-live, even at a dodgy frame rate, the first time that his song “Ten Things” made my heart leap into my brain. I hope it does the same for you. Thanks for reading!
*If you want to hear that mundane story, I will share it with you. Also, I found this while trying to see if TMD still had any web presence, and I can’t not share it.
Ben Irving at the Carlouel Yacht Club (Clearwater Beach, FL)
In early 1938, Ben Irving took his third (documented) trip through Florida, stopping around the Tampa Bay region on the 16th-19th of January. It’s unclear what his specific business was in Clearwater, but he wrote on the reverse of this postcard (above) that he was on his way across to Tampa, likely around Safety Harbor on route 17.
Shortly after the Great 2020 “Lockdown” began, my partner and I took a drive across to check out Clearwater and seek out a pair of postcard sites from Irving’s collection. We spent half the day there without realizing that Clearwater is basically to Scientologists what Salt Lake is to the Latter-Day Saints. We should have noticed it when we saw the intense glow-up on the Hotel Fort Harrison, which Irving had visited previously in 1936 (and will likely earn its own entry sometime). If you want a harrowing gaze into the Scientologists’ relationship with Clearwater, check out these documents from the Seventies.
Anyway, this entry is about Clearwater Beach, which is a municipality of Clearwater on a long, skinny offshore archipelago across the causeway into the Gulf. It has a more distinct beach-tourism orientation with a major aquarium and, apparently, 100% more Hulk Hogans. On the northern isthmus of the island, right before it tapers off and becomes Caladesi Island State Park, lies the Carlouel Yacht Club, established in 1934.
It would be interesting to see an analysis on the discourse of the term “yacht club” during the Depression versus now (whether the emphases on privatization and exclusivity were different at the time), but either way, Clearwater Beach used a photograph of a Cabana scene there to advertise itself in the pre-Disney era. There were enough families in the area by this point two decades past the city’s incorporation who could afford the $100 membership (roughly $1,950 in 2021), and the Cabanas, facing out into the Dunedin Channel (a smart move, given storm surges off the Gulf), were a good image to sell the area to snow-bound Northerners. It must have worked, since the club operated exclusively in the winter months prior to 1954, when I assume Clearwater’s permanent resident population ironed out. An official 1950 count put the population around 15,000; today it is well over 115,000.
On that initial visit to scope out the Yacht Club, for reasons of privacy and COVID, we were not able to talk our way in. However, I met the club’s General Manager Kelley Williams outside, and we exchanged info. A little over a month later, I was able to line up an appointment to wander the grounds with the above postcard. Kelley took great interest in my postcard, and it occurred to her that they had the original reference photograph somewhere. After some searching, she found it on the wall of a small bathroom upstairs from the central Palmer Room. I was dumbfounded:
Kelley was unaware of who framed the image and ascribed the “ca. 1940’s” caption on the plaque or when they did it, but the postmark on Irving’s postcard proved that the photo was taken sometime in the 1930’s. I have no way to prove my suspicion that the photo was completely staged, but that’s still my suspicion, along with how the picture was probably taken shortly after the cabana housing was completed. Why wouldn’t they have wanted to show it off, along with the mile-plus of sandy beach on their doorsteps?
As much as I hate photos of printed photos (especially those with frame glare), I couldn’t find a scanned version. Here’s the original with a special overlay of the postcard:
I also didn’t realize, even as I was searching for the original depicted site to re-photograph it, that the image captured a profoundly physically different era for the club. In the mid-1950’s, around when the club switched to year-round operation, a fire destroyed most of the original structure. From the history page on the Carlouel website:
During the reconstruction, the decor changed from casual to a more formal appearance. Later improvements included enclosing the bay front terrace, adding the Palmer Room, building a sea wall, roque court, swimming pool, tennis courts, and additional cabanas. The short-course Olympic pool was added in 1962.
I guessed that they would stage the photo right inside the club’s entrance, but I did not suspect how the original waterfront was basically extinct. Kelley did not have access to any old maps or other documentation about the reconstruction, and I suspect few, if any, members from that time are still around to recall it. All I could really do was take a guess based on how the main entrance and banquet hall sit on the club’s classic acreage. I am prepared to be told I am way off, but here are two of my guesses:
I’m partial to the latter, since it also worked with the current setup of the cabana housing, which is now formed of connected units, unlike the individual houses seen in the pre-1938 photo. The landscaping is so radically different from the original photo that I also took the horizon into consideration, as well as how much space the beachfront sand originally occupied.
I also looked up the satellite imagery of the Yacht Club (above), which only served to add to my confusion. If the Club has not acquired or last any land since the 1930’s (which is perfectly unlikely), then those Tennis courts are directly on top of what was once the voluminous beach. Interestingly enough, you can see on this satellite image where the public Mandalay Point Road ends and a private drive of mansions with boats (some appear to be yachts) docked across the street.
Per usual, cracking a little into the mystery behind a landscape depicted on one of Ben Irving’s postcards has generated a bevy of new questions. Maybe I’ll have to go back there sometime. Maybe someone who was there and then will see this and reach out to me. Either way, it was a privilege to do this. Special thanks to Kelley J. Williams and all the Carlouel members and staff on board that day. Until next time…
Going Back to Mayo Part II: Back in Mayo Again
Considering how much down-time 2020 has afforded us, I found myself surprisingly mobile this year. It turns out that driving across the country is a good socially-distanced activity, even when passing through states which are, with a lot of help from psychopathic governors and yell-talking Boomers who still think they have a shot with that 20-something bartender, COVID-addled nightmares.
Speaking of Florida, I found myself back in Mayo, the seat of the state’s thinly populated Lafayette County. The whole county’s population sits well under 10,000, and the Republican Party ticket dominated over 85% of the vote, among the most lopsided differential in the state. I hate to paint any state as “Red” or “Blue,” considering how Georgia proved that nothing is permanent, but Florida really feels like the quintessential nest for Trumpism (see previous paragraph). I’m still unconvinced that boats can operate in Tampa Bay unless they are flying at least two MAGA flags. Further into this tangent, the preponderance of Trump boat parades led some right-wing pundits to express sheer shock at their Dear Leader losing based upon this gaudy empirical evidence. It’s almost like they learned nothing from the 1936 Literary Digest election poll, but some a bizarre inverse version focusing on people whose identity and self-worth is expressed through boat ownership (that I’m not qualified to conduct).
Five years ago, I wrote about how some colleagues and I first wound up in Mayo in 2010 while interviewing locals about 2001 wildfires. In March 2015, my friend and I stopped through on a scenic drive between Tallahassee and Gainesville. A number of shops and eateries that I recalled from 2010 were no longer there, including one prominent smokehouse, which I believe had turned into a pizza place of dubious functioning status.
I only had time to grab lunch at a corner cafe (apparently defunct, even as of this writing 5 months later), take a few photos of the amazing Lafayette County Court House (and Chateau de Lafayette across the street, seen in this post’s cover photo), and stop into the Dust Catcher thrift shop, run by Vi Johnson.
I chatted with Vi for a few minutes before purchasing a one-time-use camera from 1999 and getting back on the road. Despite owning the building, Vi was hoping that somebody would buy her out, considering how many books and curios she had accumulated with no real hope for moving otherwise. Similar to many similar towns I’ve found via the Ben Irving Postcard Project (Belding, MI, for example), the Interstate Highways had long since redirected most traffic away from FL-27, sapping the tiny municipality of any real potential for sustainable economic gains. As if that wasn’t already an insurmountable challenge to any local entrepreneurs, she added, the opening of Dollar stores at opposing ends of Main Street “absolutely killed” her. Additionally, the biggest local company, a logging concern, had successfully petitioned to remove most of the parallel parking spots from Main Street in order to give their mammoth trucks unfettered access to tear through the mostly-vacant downtown. I’m not injecting any personal opinion here when I type that it’s a sad state of affairs.
Anyway, the last thing I want to do is look down my nose at small towns that are, through no fault of their own, aging out and clinging to life. I finally read Chris Arnade’s book Dignity this fall, and in it, he outlines the danger of romanticizing the struggles of those “left behind” in America. I also struggle with my love of small towns, considering how I have never really lived in one. As I’ve also written here, I grew up in a town that loved throwing that label around, but considering how much money (both New England-auld and 90’s nouveau-riche) swirls through the place, I would refrain from slapping John Cougar Mellencamp in the background of a video about it (more on that coming in 2021).
If anybody reads this and happens to know somebody opening up a retro-style café or bar, I have a lead on a functioning, vintage soda fountain for sale in North Florida. You can’t see much of it in this photo (below), but it’s under there, I promise, and it’s a classic.
Taking a Roll of 22-Year-Old Film Across America
In late July, I drove from Florida to Michigan. On the way through the Florida panhandle, I stopped through the one-stoplight town of Mayo, where I’ve paid a visit every five years since I wound up there during a filming trip in 2010. I stopped into a thrift store which used to be the town’s thriving pharmacy, striking up a conversation with Vi, the elderly woman who owns the building and runs the shop. I didn’t find any tapes, records, or books that I felt the need to own (save for a cool-looking yet too-water-damaged book on Sacco and Vanzetti), but I did find one of those old K-Mart one-time-use cameras. Vi asked me for one dollar, which I gladly paid for yet another analog experiment.
The camera itself was sealed inside a silver polypropylene bag inside a cardboard package, though one corner of the camera’s cardboard casing was beginning to disintegrate. The packaging suggested bringing it to my local K-Mart for the professionals there to develop once I took all 27 exposures, ideally by the latter part of 1999. As one might expect, I took this as a challenge. I made sure to keep the camera inside the poly bag to protect it from sunlight and (as much as possible) excessive heat in my car.
Over the course of my drive, I took most of the exposures, finishing the camera-roll when I was back in Central Michigan. The mechanism appeared to work fine, and I heard a definitive “CLICK” whenever I wound and then hit the shutter button. I tried to charge the flash to test the outside chance that it would work, but alas, whatever self-contained mechanism these disposable cameras use to generate a flash had withered over the two decades it spent sitting in the Dust Catcher).
Anyway, I contacted my colleagues in the CMU Photography department, who regretfully were unable to help me out, between workloads and COVID-related restrictions to darkroom use for people not registered in the program. I didn’t blame them, since I don’t recall being in a darkroom since around the time when my 35mm Disposable Camera was manufactured. However, they did direct me to Express Photo in Livonia, one of few (if any) labs in the state who still routinely develop consumer-grade 35mm film. I called them up, and they had me ship them the camera along with a very simple form to request processing and prints.
Within a few days, I got an envelope from them in my mailbox. I expected them to call me up and tell me that the film was too faded to be worth printing, but that was not the case. Here’s a sample of what turned out.
I scanned these photos using my extremely frustrating EPSON XP-400, which I wouldn’t recommend unless you are given one (which I was). I did not color-correct or contrast-correct any of the pictures. Of course, no LCD screen is capable of fully recreating the original, no matter how high-resolution, but hopefully these images give you a good impression of just how rich the film remained over twenty years in the can.
I imagine that, had the one-time-use camera not been sealed in its poly bag, the whole thing would have been dust. Not to knock on K-Mart, but I don’t associate them (or anybody in the one-time-use camera market) with enduring quality built to last decades in a high-humidity area. I’ve found similar blogs that shoot and develop film that had sat somewhere cool and dry for 10-15 years, but shooting a roll of consumer film manufactured in the late-90’s was on the whole next level. Thankfully, I’ve always had a healthy skepticism of expiration dates on consumer goods, especially those which were marketed during the run-n-gun, waste-waste-waste late-20th century.
Also, despite my professed love of retroactive archives of 20th century culture like Scene In-Between and Dirty Old Boston (thanks to one of my GEO 350: United States & Canada students for the latter), I’m usually squeamish about scanning analog media and posting them haphazardly on the internet, which is why I’m only sharing a handful of the pictures. They’re nothing terribly personal, at any rate. I hope this may influence somebody to take a chance on a similar roll of film and not let it just go to waste, especially not throwing it into a landfill.
The Hotel Quincy: A Panhandle Mystery (Part 1)
On some occasions, the Ben Irving Postcard Project leads me down a path into scouring the internet for information on hotels that no longer exist in any form (unless you consider a parking lot a form). On rare occasions, his postcards lead me into small towns and ghosts of buildings that don’t exist even in (digitally accessible) historical records. Most of the larger cities that Ben visited have been blanketed with Google Streetview imagery, making ground-truthing of the postcard images slightly redundant (though never unnecessary). However, some of the smaller towns, even where Streetview previewing is possible, don’t tell much of the story.
Take, for example, the Hotel Quincy in Quincy, FL, the lobby of which is detailed in this 1936 postcard:
I’ve been through the Florida panhandle once or twice, mostly speeding through the stretch between Pensacola and Tallahassee save for a lunch stop in DeFuniak Springs (thanks for the tip, Bruce Hunt). I never heard of Quincy, a small town not far from the US-10 west of Tallahassee, until I saw this postcard. The city’s website, especially the history page, is bare-bones.
In 1956, Edward Gearhart wrote this history of the Episcopal Church in Quincy for the Florida Historical Quarterly, but that’s the only academic article I could find that focused on the town, other than a couple of hard-scientific studies on bees and/or soybeans. I searched for any references to the hotel on the Newspapers.com database, which turned up one promising blurb. I contacted the Florida State University library via the “Ask a Librarian” portal on their website and asked about the April 22, 1951 edition of the Tallahassee Democrat. Within a few minutes, I had that page in front of me. The article “Hotel Quincy Changes Hands” contained more information and history about the hotel than anything repeated Google searches could produce:
New owners have taken over the Hotel Quincy property and have plans for modernizing the building which has been closed for the past year. The property, at the corner of Jefferson and Duval streets, has been acquired by H E Corry, Sr., H E Corry, Jr, Miami, and associates from Mrs. Frank W Lloyd. Plans for altering and modernizing the building are in the tentative stage at present, according to Corry, though he was quite definite in stating that the new owners contemplate placing the hotel in an operable condition as quickly as possible. The hotel has been closed a year after being in operation for more than a third of a century. Corry stated it would require a minimum of from five to six months time to complete, the changes contemplated. He anticipated preliminary work would begin within the next three weeks. A modernized glass front for the hotel is prominent in tentative remodeling plans.
So, in one very short article which, in all likelihood, nobody has read in almost seventy years, I found the hotel’s location (at Jefferson and Duval Streets), rough date of opening and initial closing (ca. 1917 – 1950), and its owners in sequence (Mrs. Frank W. Lloyd until 1951, H.E. Corry and Son of Miami thereafter).
Searching for the hotel’s owners has also opened up a pair of windows into Florida’s aristocratic history. Looking up “Frank W. Lloyd,” even including a “-wright” search clause, was maddening for the same reasons that Googling “Ben Irving” is difficult (it keeps on pushing me toward Irving Berlin data). The search engines are fast, but they aren’t smart. The only publicly accessible record of a Frank W. Lloyd that lines up with this story is a mention of a Spanish-American war veteran. Of course, his name shows up all over digital back-issues of the Tallahassee Democrat.
The less common/searched name “Corry” was a bit easier, though once I put the “H.E.” in quotation marks, it got interesting. On September 9, 1949, the Tallahassee Democrat published a blurb announcing the birth of Henry Edmund III, which more or less confirms what the H.E. stood for. Also, it mentions that his grandparents were based in Quincy. His mother’s family were the Martorells of Tampa, whose name I don’t recall seeing anywhere in the Bay Area. According to a blurb published the previous April announcing the Corry-Martorell wedding, H.E. Jr. got into the family construction business and the couple was planning to reside in Miami.
I’ll spare you the other detritus I scraped up when searching that name, save for a Gadsden County Times society page mention from April 1934: “Mr. and Mrs. H. E. Corry, Mr. and Mrs. Jack Vrieze, Rev. and Mrs. E. M. Claytor and Mr. and Mrs. K. A. MacGowan of Quincy and Mr. and Mrs. Frank Harrison of Tallahassee, spent Wednesday on the Gulf on board Mr. Corry’s yacht.” Even living in age when most people obsessively curate their online personae through social media platforms, reading Society Pages from that era just feels invasive and unsettling.
I hopped over to Florida Memory to see if that name generated anything good buried in the growing digital archive out of Tallahassee. I did find a few items of interest, one of which was this photo of a judge’s birthday party from approximately 1919. Edmond Corry is labeled with #16, standing in the jacket and bowtie on the left side of the picture. He appears to be about 10 or 11 years old?
I also found several references to Corry Field, which refers to both the Pensacola Air Force base as well as the former High School’s Athletic field in Quincy. I think the latter is more relevant.
Anyway, the long and short of this is that this will require some ground-truthing in the Florida Panhandle, and I hope to respond to this entry in a few weeks with the Part 2 that it deserves. Also, while I have your attention, librarians are heroes and you should fight to ensure they get all of the public and private funding coming to them. Food for thought. Thanks for reading!
By the way, there will be an August song challenge.
The Ben Irving Postcard Project: Lakeland, FL
I love Florida, but I also have no doubt in my mind that it is our weirdest state. It leans on its Spanish history in some corners, yet nothing is built to last. It came of age as an ostensible Garden of Eden (some still think the actual Garden of Eden was there*), yet it’s been meticulously plowing under its natural beauty in favor of strip malls, parking lots, and surface highways that necessitate signs warning motorists of the upcoming intersection. I spent a lot of time in the Miami area growing up, and I am just old enough to remember the Rascal House’s last burst of glory before it got swallowed by development. You can refer to David Sax’s Save the Deli (2010) if you’d like to learn more about just how bad things got before they finally cut the cord and closed the place. I’m also looking forward to checking out Andy Sweet’s photo book about the “golden era” of Jewish Miami, which was quickly fading by the time I was old enough to pay attention to my surroundings down there.
Anyway, I will leave Miami for what will ideally be a separate entry once I’m able to visit. Today’s post is about (depending on how you look at the map or believe what the University system dictates) Central or Southern Florida, a region I greatly increased my familiarity with as an adult. As a kid, the Central Region meant Disney World, Universal Studios, and Disney World. Never mind the five-plus major Universities that dotted the sprawling Orlando landscape (Or-landscape?) which have fostered one of the South’s most under-the-radar booming cities for the past two decades? These days, driving through Orlando feels like driving through Atlanta, in that the whole thing appears to be under construction and if you drive through it, you will be white-knuckling past jersey barriers for almost the entire thing. I’ve also written about Tampa here, since it was the setting of one of my favorite AAG meetings.
The focus of this week’s entry is one of Florida’s unheralded smaller cities, Lakeland. During the Florida land-boom that crashed in 1926, Lakeland was a major railway stop between Orlando and Tampa. Today, it’s conveniently located off of I-4, and had I not had a handful of postcards from Ben Irving, I probably would not have paid it much mind.
Let’s go to the tape:
The Hotel Lakeland Terrace, 1939
“Hotel Lakeland Terrace” postcard (Mailed February 1939) with the Terrace Hotel in the background, taken May 2020.
Here, we have a look at the Terrace Hotel, overlooking Mirror Lake. As the postcard suggests, the lake is filled with all kinds of waterfowl. If you get there in the Springtime, you’ll get a chance to see plenty of mama ducks and mama geese with their offspring:
According to their official pamphlet (which includes the image from the 1939 Postcard I’m holding up in the photo above), the Lakeland Terrace opened in 1924 under the aegis of Florida Collier Coast Hotels, who had opened nearly identical hotels in Miami, West Palm Beach, and Tampa.
In the days before air conditioning, most hotels opened for The Season and closed by summer. But, the early ‘twenties were boom times in the Sunshine State. Trainloads of tourists poured into cities like Lakeland, beckoned by the siren call of warm weather and the chance to make a quick fortune speculating on cheap land.
Mysteriously, their official literature jumps to when the Lakeland Terrace re-opened in 1998 under the ownership of FCA, Corp. and a Lakelander named Rob Scharar. I don’t know if it’s intentional, but details about the hotel’s inevitable downturn in the 1970s and 1980s are relatively hard to come by. Even the hotel’s Wikipedia page is, as of this writing, languishing as a skeletal draft – very odd for such a historic building.
According to Lonnie Brown’s column on the Opinion Page of the July 12, 1987 edition of the Lakeland Ledger, the city had just re-dedicated the wall around Mirror Lake. Apparently, it had been featured in the January 1930 edition of National Geographic, which I’m going to try to dig up after finishing this sentence. Thankfully, the National Geographic Society are great archivists, and the full run of their print editions are available publicly.
The January 1930 edition featured “Twenty-Four Pages of Illustrations in Full Color” for their Florida – the Fountain of Youth feature by John Oliver la Gorce. Given my interest in Florida’s 20th century, this issue would be something of a grail for me. “Flipping” through the digital version online unveils a time capsule of the state, post-land-boom. A full-page ad announces that the Atlantic Coast Railway runs 17 trains per day (25 total in Lakeland by the turn of the century, according to the city’s website) into Florida, only “23 1/3 Hours from New York” (where I imagine the bulk of Nat Geo’s depression-era readers lived). La Gorce’s feature is full of pithy observations about the state, including a great statement about the “real Florida” and the “tourist Florida,” as well as a differentiation between the North and the South: “North Florida… is as different from south Florida as lower Alabama from Cuba.” As one would expect of a major publication from 1930, the writer gave a lot of credit to everyone from Ponce de León to Henry Flagler, the Standard Oil industrialist who he praised as a nearly-divine visionary. The photo of Mirror Lake finally appears on p. 41, comparing it to the entrance to a Venetian palace. It even suggests Lakeland feels like “a fairy city on an iridescent sea,” a statement that Lonnie Brown bore in mind while reflecting on how far things had fallen over the previous five decades:
During a 1987 walk through downtown, with empty stores and an old hotel that is in such disrepair it has been shut down by the city, it is hard to imagine Lakeland as a “fairy city on an iridescent sea” with Venetian overtones.
Brown goes on to praise the refurbishing of the sea wall around the lake, citing how it makes Lakeland appear to be a city invested in its downtown. He continued writing for the paper through the end of 2010, when he retired. LkldNow, an independent local news site, had a bit of history about the building that preceded the Lakeland Terrace on the site. According to the Lakeland Library,
“The Tremont House was built by Lakeland founder Abraham Munn in 1885 at the corner of East Main Street and Massachusetts Avenue, the present site of the Lakeland Terrace Hotel. It was considered to be one of the most elegant hotels in Central Florida at the time of its construction. So elegant was it that it was reputed to have the first bathtubs in all of Lakeland. The Tremont was moved from the corner of Main and Massachusetts to an adjacent lot in 1911 and enlarged. By the 1930’s, however, the Tremont had been eclipsed by the larger and more elegant Terrace, Thelma and New Florida Hotels. It was torn down in 1936.”
I will report back if I find any more details about the downfall of the Lakeland Terrace Hotel; it’s unclear whether the city was crafty with digital scrubbing or if Lakeland was just small enough to fly under the radar with archived news.
Munn Park
Speaking of Abraham Munn, his name remains on the city’s downtown park, which is the subject of my second postcard, which Irving mailed on January 23, 1936.
Going to Munn Park today with this postcard image in mind is confusing, because the park has been redone numerous times over the years. Save for a thin layer of tall trees which line the park and a pair of patches of greenery, a lot of the vegetation advertised above is no longer there. In fact, as you’ll see a few photos down, most of Munn park is overlaid with bricks and fairly nondescript. The only evident fountain was clearly different from the one in the postcard; had it been the same one, the railroad tracks in the background might have been visible. Something about the fountain yelled “relocated,” but we only had a hunch.
Thankfully, my partner and I bumped into Julie Townsend, who works for Downtown Lakeland. Julie quickly pointed out where the postcard image pointed, which was the Southwest corner, where Tennessee Avenue met Main Street.
Again, notice how barren much of Munn Park is. According to Julie, the city wrapped a weird, post-modernist design into their 80’s-era refurbishment of the park, which proved (like a lot of risks city planners were taking back then) less than popular. I can’t recall when she said they took it apart and bricked it over with these cement hexagons, but it definitely had that “unfinished” feel to it. The fountain depicted in the back left corner had long since gone away, and the statue was no longer. I waged a guess that it was a removed Confederate monument, which turned out to be true.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I did some research and found out the statue of the unknown Confederate soldier, funded by the Daughters of the Confederacy in 1910, was just removed from Munn Park last year. Unfortunately, rather than grinding the statue into a fine powder and putting it to good use in one of Lakeland’s numerous construction projects, they’ve simply relocated it to a Memorial Park closeby. Of course, neo-Confederate groups and other people who sport those “I stand for the Flag / I kneel for the Cross” decals are trying to sue the city to put the statue back in Munn Park, and the battle is getting messy in the courts. Hopefully it gets thrown out so we can all go back to living in the 21st century.
The Hotel Thelma
This was another interesting case study. This postcard was mailed in February of 1939, but stood for another few decades at least, based upon this 1950 photograph I found on Florida Memory (below), which reads: “Built in 1913 at a cost of $125,000 by twin brothers A.B. and D.B. Kibler (phosphate entrepeneurs). Six years later the hotel originally named “The Kibler” was bought by H.B. Carter and renamed. For many years it was a popular place for civic club meetings. It stood on the northeast corner of Kentucky Avenue and Lemon Street.”
Standard Oil…phosphate entrepreneurs… it’s almost like the state’s lifeblood was underwritten by people whose wealth depended upon destroying its natural beauty. I know I just described almost every state, but especially this one.
Anyway, the Hotel Thelma was torn down in 1962, shortly after this photo (I imagine the final one in existence) was taken. Today, a restaurant called Fresco’s sits on the Northeast corner of Lemon and Kentucky Avenue, and Palace Pizza (visible in the background of both the postcard and the repeat photograph of the block) remains as the one anchor to the city’s past.
For what it’s worth, Palace Pizza had some of the best pizza I’ve had in Florida, and they didn’t even pay me to post that. They had a big patio available with adequately spaced seating for COVID regulations, too. This meant a lot to my partner and I (in our masks) after one of the (mask-free) managers at Fresco’s stepped within 3 feet of me and practically breathed in my face to tell me that Hotel Thelma used to be there. Helpful, yes, but mindful, no, considering what a pandemic cesspool we’re in here.
According to the best website on the internet, Cinema Treasures, the Palace Theater was also opened in 1913:
Opened in 1913 as the Casino Theatre. Seating was located in orchestra and balcony levels. By 1926 it had been renamed Palace Theatre. By 1941 it was operated by Paramount Pictures Inc. through their subsidiary E.J. Sparks. The Palace Theatre was listed as (Closed) in 1943, but had reopened by 1950.
The 100 Block of S. Kentucky Avenue, Lakeland, FL, guessing sometime in the 1940s. (Image from the Lakeland Public Library via CinemaTreasures.org).
Strangely, another account of a historic Lakeland Landmark that evaporates before talking about the building’s descent into under-use. One user actually found and linked this 1980 article from the Lakeland Ledger that mentioned how the Palace building had been stripped of its history and uniqueness. According to this listicle, the Palace Theater operated from 1925 – 1950, which contradicts the idea that it reopened after closing in 1950.
Based on my experiences seeking historical sites there, it feels like Lakeland, FL can work as both a cautionary tale about scrubbing your history and a reminder that reinvestment is not a quick fix. Julie Townsend told us that Lakeland was one of Florida’s early major cities because it was located on the rail line that connected Orlando and Tampa. Prior to Orlando’s reinvention as the theme park capital of the planet, old-timers talked about the three cities in the same breath. Today, it’s a fun smaller city with pretty decent pizza, a wonderful lake perimeter walk, a couple of fantastic little record shops, an antique mall on par with the greatest ones I know from Michigan, Frank Lloyd Wright contributions (by the way!) at Florida Southern College, and zero threat of the traffic and headache that one can find around every corner in Tampa or Orlando. When it comes to civic life and urban planning, there’s nothing to be ashamed of a few shameful decades if you’re willing to learn from them.
Liner Notes
* I’m serious. Consult Gloria Jahoda’s book The Other Florida (1967) if this piques your interest.
Your Sonic Sunday: May 31st (Ruby Pearl Diamond and Chris Rusk)
This week’s Sonic Sunday is brought to you by THE INTERNET. Well, specifically, the Florida Memory portion of the internet. I was looking for more information about the Hotel Floridan in Tampa – I did find this cool 1920 photo of the lobby – and wound up searching left and right for information on a Jewish dowager from Tallahassee named Ruby Pearl Diamond after this photo came up in the results. I don’t know who coded their search algorithm, but that’s where I found it.
I quickly found this article about Ruby, which runs through her (very interesting) life story, which linked the old world, Southern Jewish tradition with the post-War progressive Southern Jewish tradition (there is such a thing).
One point that jumped out to me was a passing mention of how her older brother Sydney, a decorated Tally attorney, “gained a reputation for collecting risqué literature and jazz records.” Well, clutch my pearls! The first question that sprang to mind was where that piece of trivia came from, so I wrote the author, Josh Parshall of the Institute of Southern Jewish Life. I’ll share any revelations as I receive them.
That’s all I got this week, other than the very cool news that Chris Rusk, an old acquaintance of mine from Knoxville (seen here, in full effect) was the guest on this week’s episode of Mike Watt’s looooooong-running podcast The Watt from Pedro Show.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to my long-overdue reading of Gloria Jahoda’s The Other Florida and revisit my favorite piece of music ever to emerge from Tallahassee. Long live Little League!*
*They broke up in 2012.
AAG 2019: Ian MacKaye Q&A, DC Punk Walking Tour, and the First Ever Academic Talk on Florida Man
The long wait is almost over: AAG DC starts this week! Because the meeting’s in the AAG’s (and my former, for a while) home base this year, I’ve been working to arrange a few special events that I’ll be announcing here, on twitter, and via the AAG’s social media as well. It’s going to be a busy but good time. You can find me at one of the following three events (or of course by just hitting me up).
FRIDAY: A CONVERSATION WITH IAN MACKAYE
1:10 – 2:50pm
Washington 1, Marriott, Exhibition Level
AAG Session Page – Event Page
I’m excited to announce that I’ll be moderating a discussion with Ian MacKaye for the keynote session of the Media and Communication Geography Specialty Group. Thank you to Ian for his interest as well as to my friend Emily Fekete at the AAG for making this happen. We’ll be talking about the relationship between the city and punk history, as well as the history of Dischord Records and his own musical career (Minor Threat, Fugazi, Embrace, The Evens, and more). Get there early to get a good seat!
SATURDAY 4/6: DC PUNK WALKING TOUR [SOLD OUT]
Meet at 12pm
Marriott 24th St Entrance
I’ll be honest: I wrote a long, fun draft entry to publish closer to the event for a last-minute push in case it didn’t fill up, but it did. I’m grateful and humbled that this tour has generated as much interest as it has. I’m sorry if you missed a chance to register for a spot, but as with any walking tour, there’s a reasonable chance for a few no-shows. If any spots do open up, I’ll make sure to announce it on twitter and contact those registered.
For now, here is the gist of what I wrote originally. I’ll wait to divulge more details until we’re closer to the event, but there will be surprises, some brought to you by our good friends at Palgrave Publishing, and others brought to you by our tour sites. You’re probably wondering, “AAG members offer plenty of great walking tours every year; why should I, a person of [indeterminate] interest in punk rock, be looking forward to this one?”
- You’ll have time built-in to enjoy some of the best Falafel, Empanadas, or food of your choice that DC has to offer.
We’ll be walking through a gastronomic epicenter toward the beginning of our tour that includes a couple of places I absolutely cannot miss when I’m in town. I’m building in some free time for eating and shopping, so you don’t need to eat a gigantic brunch beforehand. But if you do, you’ll have more time to focus on… - Shopping for records, clothes, and other merchandise.
Get your souvenir shopping out of the way while learning about DC culture. Why spend your money on some Washington Monument snow globe when you could have something from a boutique where locals actually hang out? Grab that Fugazi record for your turntable or that photo book for your coffee table. - You’ll meet luminaries of the DC punk scene.
Any stroll through Adams-Morgan and Mount Pleasant on a Saturday afternoon affords you plenty of chances to bump into somebody who played (and still plays) a key role in the DC punk story. For this tour, I’ve been coordinating cameos from some of my favorite people I knew from the scene when I lived there as well as some great folks I met while working on the book. - You’ll get those steps in.
Many landmark sites in harDCore history are right down the street from the conference hotel in Adams-Morgan and around the corner in Mount Pleasant. In other words, no hopping on and off of a shuttle, dealing with traffic, or battling tourists on the Metro. That being said, if you have a disability and require transport assistance, please notify us in your registration. From what I remember, all of the key sites we’ll be visiting (and most lunch/shopping options) are accessible. - I will be leading it.
Not that I would be the biggest selling point, but I’d be grateful to have you along for my first AAG walking tour, in a neighborhood that was so important to me when I lived there (and still is). Over my time there, I heard so many stories and have so many great memories (not included in Capitals of Punk) I look forward to sharing.
Let me know if you have any questions [sonicgeography at gmail]. We will take off from Marriott Wardman Park’s 24th St Entrance on Saturday 4/6 at Noon. See you there!
SUNDAY: LIGHTNING TALK ON FLORIDA MAN
3:55 – 5:05 PM
Contemporary Issues in Human Geography
Washington 6, Marriott, Exhibition Level
You read that right: I’m engaging with some research on the Florida Man. This is a topic that, as a cultural geographer with a soft spot for Florida (that I catch heat for, no pun intended), I’ve been interested in for some time. It seems that every six months or so, the internet breathes new life into this apocryphal character. Recently, a meme went around imploring people to google “Florida Man” and their birthday. Much of my research focuses on circulation, and internet-mediated phenomena like these work wonders(?) to perpetuate (inter)national perspectives on what makes Florida assume the mantel of “our weirdest state.”
I understand many of you may have skipped town by Sunday afternoon, but this session looks like it will be amazing: talks on Kingston, Cincinnati, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP), Climate security, and Uttarakhand.
Anyway, see you in DC. If you’re not going, you’ll be missed and I’ll be happy to give you all a rundown of the highlights from this year’s meeting on this site sometime after I get back to Knoxville. I’m still reeling as I write this from a great time in Memphis at the Balancing the Mix conference, in fact. Thanks to Mark Duffett and Amanda Nell Edgar for putting it together. If I have time this week (that’s a big ‘if’), I’ll post an update or two about the conference as well as the West Tennessee chapter of the Ben Irving Postcard Project.
Sonic Geography 