Henry B. Plant and the Tampa Bay Hotel
Near Tampa Bay, Florida
In eighteen eighty-three, Henry Bradley Plant's railroad reached Tampa from Charleston. At that point, Tampa was a frontier town with a population of well under a thousand people, no particular reason for tourists to visit, and no hotel capable of receiving them if they had.
Plant fixed that. In eighteen ninety-one he opened the Tampa Bay Hotel, a Moorish Revival palace on the Hillsborough River with six silver-painted minarets among thirteen domes and cupolas visible for miles. It cost more than three million dollars to build at a time when a skilled worker made a dollar and a half a day. Plant staged the grand opening himself, importing an orchestra from New York and inviting half of Gilded Age society to see what he had done in the Florida wilderness.
A decade later, the building became famous for a different reason. When the United States declared war on Spain in eighteen ninety-eight and needed a staging ground for troops heading to Cuba, Tampa was the chosen port. The Tampa Bay Hotel became the war's operational headquarters. Correspondents and officers filled its ballrooms and its verandas. Richard Harding Davis, the most famous war correspondent in the country, was there. Theodore Roosevelt, then a lieutenant colonel in the cavalry regiment that would become the Rough Riders, passed through the same rooms before shipping out.
The hotel fell into decline after the war. The city of Tampa eventually converted it into the University of Tampa campus. The museum on the hotel's ground floor preserves the original ballrooms and furnishings, a collection of European and Asian objects Plant imported to give the building its improbable grandeur. It is one of the stranger rooms in the American South, which is saying something.
