The Fort Harrison Hotel: Before the Church Arrived

The building that dominates the skyline of downtown Clearwater was not always associated with the Church of Scientology. It was built as the Fort Harrison Hotel in nineteen twenty-six, a project of developer Ed Haley who saw the land boom of the mid-nineteen twenties as an opportunity. The new hotel was named for an early military fortification that had stood near the site, and it opened in time to receive the wave of wealthy northern tourists pouring into Florida during the boom.

When the boom collapsed and the Depression set in, the hotel survived. After the Second World War, a notable owner took control of the property. Ransom Olds, the automotive pioneer whose name is embedded in the Oldsmobile brand, had sold his active business interests long before but retained his fortune, and he traded ownership of a racetrack to acquire the Fort Harrison Hotel.

Olds ran the hotel until his death in nineteen fifty. The Jack Tar Hotel group purchased it in nineteen fifty-three, adding air conditioning, an auditorium, and a wing of poolside cabanas, updating the building for the expectations of postwar Florida tourists. Through the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties the Fort Harrison was a respectable mid-century Gulf coast resort hotel, the kind of place where convention groups met and winter visitors stayed for weeks.

In October of nineteen seventy-five, the Church of Scientology purchased the building for two million three hundred thousand dollars and converted it into what they call the Flag Land Base, their largest spiritual headquarters in the world. The building that Haley built in boom-time nineteen twenty-six has thus had three distinct lives, each one impossible to anticipate from the vantage point of the one before.