The Streamline Hotel: Art Deco on the Atlantic
Near Daytona, Florida
The Streamline Hotel at one forty South Atlantic Avenue is the oldest standing hotel in Daytona Beach, and it wears its history in every curve. Built around nineteen forty, the building is a textbook example of Streamline Moderne, an Art Deco substyle that borrowed its vocabulary from the machine age: long horizontal bands, rounded corners, nautical porthole windows, and a sense of movement frozen in concrete.
The hotel was built to be noticed and to be safe. A plaque outside still announces that it was the first fireproof building in Daytona Beach. During World War Two it is said to have doubled as the city's unofficial bomb shelter, which suggests both how serious the coastal blackout era was taken in Florida and how thick that poured concrete actually was.
During the racing season it filled with celebrities, speed merchants, and what one account delicately calls moonshine gangsters who used the beach course for more than recreation. Stories persist of a sealed tunnel entrance in the basement that once led toward the beach.
But the moment that defines the Streamline's place in history happened on December fourteenth, nineteen forty-seven, on the rooftop bar. That was the day Bill France Senior gathered drivers, promoters, and mechanics and began the conversations that would produce NASCAR. The formation papers were signed in February nineteen forty-eight. A plaque on the building marks the spot.
The hotel fell into disrepair over the decades and was sold in twenty fourteen to a local developer who put six million dollars into restoring it. It reopened in twenty seventeen and now operates as a boutique hotel with a rooftop bar that commands the same view France would have had: the Atlantic on one side, the city spreading west on the other.
