The Cavalier Hotel: Where Six Presidents Slept

When it opened on Memorial Day weekend of nineteen twenty-seven, the Cavalier Hotel sat atop a hill above the Virginia Beach oceanfront with the bearing of something that expected to last. Its architects gave it a Renaissance Revival exterior, seven stories, a Y-shaped floor plan that sent wings angling toward the sea, and one hundred and thirty-five rooms, all with a private bath and most with ocean views. At a moment when private bathrooms in hotels were still a luxury worth advertising, that mattered.

The Cavalier Beach Club opened two years later and became the place to hear big bands. Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller are said to have played there. Frank Sinatra, Cab Calloway, and Lawrence Welk. In the dining room and the lounges, the guest registers are said to have held names such as: Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson. F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Bette Davis. Judy Garland. Muhammad Ali.

In nineteen forty-two, the United States Navy commandeered the building as a training center and held it for three years. The interruption cost the hotel its momentum. Decades of slow decline followed, changes of ownership, deferred maintenance, the hotel moving down-market and then out of use entirely.

It was sold under court order in two thousand and thirteen. Restoration began with a budget of fifty million dollars and ended with a bill of eighty-one million. The renovated Cavalier reopened on March seventh, two thousand and eighteen, with sixty-two rooms and twenty-three suites. The hill is still there. The bearing has been recovered.