Henry Plant's Impossible Hotel

In eighteen eighty-eight, Henry Plant announced he would build the grandest hotel in the Americas in a Florida swamp town of fewer than three thousand people.

The skepticism was reasonable. Tampa in the late eighteen eighties was a rough port town with sandy streets and a chronic yellow fever problem. But Plant was not building a hotel for the people of Tampa. He was building a destination that would fill his railroad cars with wealthy passengers traveling south from the frozen Northeast, and a statement that his Plant System of railroads and steamships could compete with Henry Flagler's East Coast operation. The two Henry's, Flagler on the Atlantic side and Plant on the Gulf, were engaged in a race to develop Florida as a winter resort for the American rich.

Plant's entry in that competition was the Tampa Bay Hotel. It opened in eighteen ninety-one. The building stretched a quarter mile along the Hillsborough River and contained five hundred rooms. It was designed in a Moorish Revival style, with thirteen silver minarets, cupolas, and horseshoe arches. It cost more than three million dollars to construct and furnish. Plant's wife Sarah furnished the interiors, buying antiques and art across Europe. She acquired, among other things, a silver collection that by itself was worth five hundred thousand dollars.

The guests who arrived found a billiards room, a card room, a ballroom, a solarium, a veranda half a mile long, electric lights, and telephones in every room. These were not common amenities in eighteen ninety-one anywhere. In Tampa they were extraordinary.

Plant died in eighteen ninety-nine. The hotel closed shortly after. The city of Tampa eventually acquired it and leased the south wing to what is now the University of Tampa. The Henry B. Plant Museum operates in that wing today, preserving the original furnishings and the improbable story of a man who dropped a Moorish palace on a Florida swamp and declared it civilization.