The Old Ormond Hotel

ah, the beach...

The old Ormond Hotel, as seen from the Halifax River

In honor of the fact that I'll be driving down to Florida on Friday, here's an essay I wrote last semester about my favorite place on the planet, a place that no longer exists. Definitely, some editing and rewriting is in order, but I don't have time. I'm packing...

When I was very young, my father began the practice of loading us all up in the car, any one of a long string of boaty Pontiacs, then Cadillacs, and driving us down to Ormond Beach, Florida. The drives themselves are an entire memoir all their own, but when Dad would coast off of I-95 onto Route 40, turning left, towards the ocean still several miles off to the east, twisting off the radio, we'd all fall silent and roll down our windows simultaneously, my brother John and I pushing our faces into the wind, waiting for the first salty breath, and the vacation would begin.

As we would approach the Granada Bridge spanning the width of the Halifax River, I'd perch on the edge of my seat, grabbing hold of the headrest behind my Dad's head, bobbing and straining to see past him for my first glimpse of the ocean, and my first peek at the old Ormond Hotel. As we approached the bridge, a rickety wooden drawbridge, John and I would scan the water for tall boats, crossing our fingers that the lights would not start blinking and the bridge rise in front of us, making us wait. We'd cross, and two days of driving and months of work stress would visibly rise from my father's shoulders and fly out the window. That alone was a wonder, a beautiful and welcome sight. The air in the car would thin, we'd all relax and smile, even my mother would flop her arm out the window and fly her hand in the current of the wind. As I've gotten older, married, had kids of my own, I've felt that weight lift from my own shoulders and understand my father more than I ever thought possible.

It was the crossing of River Road and the drive onto the bridge that did it for him and does it for me—knowing, with sudden, delighted certainty, that we were entering a place where we could let go of everything we'd left behind at home. Crossing that bridge somehow caused us to relax, signaling the approach of a week, ten days, or more of sitting on our asses on hot sand, doing nothing, waiting for the ice cream man to drive up the beach (when that was still allowed), staring out at the water and letting our minds go blank, feeling the sting of sun on our skin. Several times, as we began to cross, the lights would go blinking and we'd have to wait, my brother John and I, and later Kenny and Anthony, uselessly craning our necks, hanging over the front seat, hoping for a glimpse of the ocean. The agony!

Until 1992, the thing I craned my neck for was not the ocean, but a view of the stunning Ormond Hotel. I've always loved the ocean, but the hotel held my fascination in a way no building has since. Miles, eleven of them, of white painted, deep porches and walkways wrapped around what was, in '92, the largest all-wooden frame structure still standing in America. My imagination never let me see the peeling paint, the places where the floorboards had fallen away. My imagination filled in the gaps, covered the rotting wood with fresh coats of paint, saw gloriously dressed women with plumes in their hair strolling the decks on the arms of carefully dressed gentlemen. We'd cross the bridge and that beauty would enter my view and I'd be transported to a lovelier, more elegant time and place in our history. I always wished my father would drive past it a little slower, but after two days of driving, asking my father for anything was a bad idea. I always wished I'd been able to walk up the entrance drive, climb the wood steps, banisters laden with ivy, stroll slowly across the rotting porches, my fingertips trailing along the railings, my mind picturing not the rush of traffic on Granada, but the clop-clop of horses hooves hitting dirt and paving brick, hearing not the grumble of idling engines at the light at Granada and John Anderson Drive but the snorts of horses, and being able to hear the pounding of the surf hitting the beach up the road, that being the loudest sound, accented by the lapping of the river against the pylons of the bridge. Ladies in long sleeves and skirts and poofy updo's would be reclining in wicker chairs on wheels called Afromobiles, so called because of the young black men pedaling them from behind, on their way down Granada Boulevard to the ocean.

I had, with the innocence of childhood, believed that the hotel would still be there when I, at some undetermined time in the future, had a boatload of money, so that I could buy it and restore it to its former glory. It saddens me more than I am capable of telling you that the dream will never be. The only means I have of bringing that hotel back to life is with my words, and I occasionally lose days of time researching it, pouring over photographs and timelines, the dream of the physical hotel rising up from the dust of demolition transformed. Would I love this building, be so fascinated by it, if it had not been standing there on Granada Boulevard , waiting for me, slowly but surely disintegrating more each year for twenty years from the time I first saw it in 1971 until its demise in '92? Not likely. The existence of the hotel is tied inextricably to my family's yearly, sometimes twice yearly, trips down to Florida. It is tied to heat and sun and the smell of Coppertone. The drips of giant Bomb pops from the ice cream man, and the red and blue stains on my hands from them. Building elaborate sand castles with my brother and watching the ocean take them, burying ourselves in the sand, poking beached jellyfish with sticks, collecting shells, ordering kiddie cocktails and charming the waitress out of handfuls of the plastic monkeys they used to anchor the cherries.

In 1968, three years before I first saw the hotel at the age of two, 24 rooms on the south side were removed to accommodate the widening of Granada Boulevard. In 1955, the current owner had designated The Ormond a Retirement Hotel. Elderly residents would mingle with retired vacationers on the long, wide, shady porches. In 1971, when I was first driven by on my way to the beach, this was still the primary use of the hotel, and by then it had been painted white, the roof tiled in a coral color. By 1980, our family had grown by two; my brother Kenny was born in '76 and Anthony in '78, and we still made the trips by Cadillac, crammed into the backseat with our school books and pillows and blankets, crayons melting into the speakers under the rear window. The hotel was placed on the National Register of Historic Places that year, but it was really the beginning of the end.

For our family, though, it was the beginning of a new life. My father's company had started to make more money. We had just moved into a new house and we each had our own bedrooms. Dad could afford to take us out to dinner nearly every night. Our favorite place to go was Julian's, not least because we shared its name. Julian's, which is still there, was always then and always still is crammed with retirees. There are no windows in the building, save for the narrow ones in the heavy wooden front doors. From the outside, the main entrance is an A-frame structure surrounded by a low, one-story building. Inside, you are transported to a tiki lounge. Four-foot-high masks, lit from behind, decorate the walls. Behind the center, sunken, semi-circle bar in the center of the restaurant is a huge mural of hula dancers. On a tiny stage rising above the bar is an organ, and at any given time, you will be treated to Hawaiian-tinged lounge music. Plastic monkeys hang by their tails off the edge of our kiddie cocktails (and now, my vodka tonics), their front legs piercing a cherry or a lime or an olive. When we were young, we'd smile and wheedle the waitresses into bringing us handfuls of the things, and that would usually keep us entertained until inevitably John would start breaking the tails off everyone else's monkeys. At the bottom of the bread basket would be these little cinnamon rolls, warm and iced. We weren't allowed to eat them until after dinner, and by then they'd be cooled, the icing hardened. But that didn't really matter because Julian's served perfectly round scoops of ice cream in pewter dishes, ice crystals forming on the outside, the ice cream so frozen it hurt our teeth to eat it. My favorite was peppermint, pink, with little green and red chewy mint nuggets hidden inside.

The next several years saw the hotel pass from one owner to the next, all with the dream of restoring it, none with the money to do so. By 1986, when I was a junior in high school and committed to hating vacations with my parents and three brothers, the city of Ormond Beach had ordered the hotel vacated, citing fire code regulations and structural problems, a nice way of saying the damn thing was a giant pile of kindling. The remaining elderly residents were moved out, and a chain-link fence erected around the buildings. This was the first time I ever was able to look at the hotel for longer than it took to drive by. Sometime during the following year, I borrowed my Dad's car and drove over there, standing up to the fence, peering through it at the decay. My dream was still alive, but the hotel was barely standing. Railings were hanging off the second-floor porches, and in some places were missing altogether. The paint was peeling, revealing the gray, rotting wood beneath. The roof had faded to a rusty pink, green shutters dangled precariously by one nail. The owner auctioned off the property in 1987 to one final dreamer, but unable to raise the estimated $30 million dollars to restore it, he began to sell off the hotel in literal bits and pieces in 1992, and it was demolished.

By 1995, the year my first child was born, a condominium complex had gone up in its place. The developer had an eye on his own memory of the hotel when he designed it, but the hulking mass of white stucco and terra-cotta roof inspires only bitter memories, at least in me.

To soothe that bitterness, I take little trips to the Halifax Historical Society, and pour over photographs and histories of the hotel, reading about Rockefeller and Ford, the birth of auto racing, the visits by Al Capone, Will Rogers, John Phillip Sousa, the Astors and the Vanderbilts. I find sweet little facts like the one about Ed Sullivan being employed at the hotel as the Golf Secretary for a short time beginning in 1923, and how he broke back into his newspaper career writing about John D. Rockefeller. The people in historical societies are always willing to talk, and on my last visit, I was privileged to be waited on by Don Gaby, the president of the society, handling dinner menus and photographs with white gloves on as he brought me binders and stacks of material. After I had chosen some photographs to be copied, Don and I went down the street for lunch, and over crabcake sandwiches, French fries and beers, he told me about his own love of the hotel, how his high school dances were held there, how it broke his heart to watch it come down.

So much has changed, yet so much remains of Ormond Beach as it was when I was young. While we can no longer drive south down A1A, go down the ramp onto the beach and drive the beach home, at 5 m.p.h., squealing as waves pound closer and closer to the wheels of our car, threatening to carry us into the ocean, I can, on days when it's permitted, take my kids a little further south and drive on the beach for a short stretch. My kids can collect plastic monkeys from their kiddie cocktails, only handfuls are a little harder to come by now. They prefer you order glass after glass of cherry-juice-spiked 7-Up in order to build up your collection. The ceramic ball with suckers stuck into the holes still sits on the hostess desk, and the hula-girl mural has been freshened, but the cinnamon rolls no longer taste the same (maybe that's because I let my kids eat them before dinner?). Instead of showing my kids the splendor of a gigantic, wooden hotel, I am reduced to dragging them to the Halifax Historical Society and showing them the miniature replica built by loving hands in honor of the old hotel. My kids look at me, shrug, and say, "Yeah, that's neat, Mom. Do they have souvenirs here?" But I can still share with them my love of the beach and the ocean, the sweet pain of watching a day's work building a sandcastle get destroyed by three or four good waves in the late afternoon. The ice cream man can't drive down the beach anymore, so I buy Bomb pops at the Publix and we three stand with our toes in the water, trying to eat them before the melt, washing our hands in the surf.

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