Hollywood Beach’s ‘Grand Lady’ needs a lot of help if she’s going to reach 100

One of the first things 96-year-old Barbara Hogan did when she got her first paycheck from working at First National Bank of Hollywood in 1946 was go to the Hollywood Beach Resort Hotel.

“They had beautiful shops out there, and I bought a pair of shoes. I thought I was somebody,” she said with a chuckle. Hogan is a native of Hollywood, Florida, who now lives in Tennessee close to her daughter. Still, the memories of what she once called home remain close.

The Hollywood Beach Resort Hotel has seen better days in its nearly 100 years: The behemoth property sprawled along Ocean Drive in Hollywood was once considered the largest economic engine of Broward County and played a pivotal role in World War II, Clive Taylor, president of the Hollywood Historical Society, said.

“The Tobin family that owned it kind of switched their business model and made it a convention hotel,” Taylor said. “So anything that ever happened in this area that was important or of any kind of significance that needed the right backdrop or meeting space, it happened at the Hollywood Beach Hotel.”

Now, the first floor of the property where Ocean Walk mall once thrived is empty and cordoned off by caution tape and an orange safety fence, the hotel registration area is empty and while the concrete facade still stands, the exterior is in disarray.

The little bit of life it had was a security guard saying the building was closed, even as the automatic doors opened and a pool was filled with water. Attempts to give the relic a facelift haven’t been successful, and the most recent effort has its current owners tied up in court

And as the city and its oldest piece of prime real estate near a century in existence, it begs the question: Why hasn’t it been redeveloped and what should become of the once-thriving epicenter for the city and the county?

“The complication is that within this acreage over the years has been as many as several thousand property interests in the form of timeshares,” Hollywood Community Redevelopment Agency Executive Director Jorge Camejo told the Miami Herald. That complication has led to several starts and stops in development plans.

Longtime residents and visitors who remember the hotel’s stature want to see it restored. “I think that it would be amazing if they could find a way to renovate it and do something with the structure,” said Mike Lewis, 44, whose family frequented Hollywood when his grandparents owned a home in the area.

“I think that that hotel is so polarizing for so many people because it just sits there and it is the beacon of old Florida,” he said.

A grand history

Known as “The Grand Lady,” the Hollywood Beach Resort Hotel was built in 1925 at the behest of the city’s founder, Joseph Wesley Young, and consisted of 500 rooms and the world’s largest solarium at the time.

The hotel, which now sits in the city’s historic overlay district, played a pivotal role in World War II, serving as the United States Naval Indoctrination and Training School. After the war, the hotel was refurbished and reopened under new management.

Taylor described a hotel once home to significant meetings, weddings, and parties and welcoming to Jewish residents in South Florida at a time when many hotel postcards blatantly said “restricted clientele.” The founder of Miami Beach, Carl Fisher, restricted his hotels to non-Jews.

“When Port Everglades was forming in its very early stages, they would have meetings and conferences at the hotel because they didn’t have a facility like this in Fort Lauderdale,” Taylor said, noting the hotel’s presence is to Broward what the Biltmore Hotel meant to Miami-Dade County and what the Breakers Hotel meant to Palm Beach County.

“I call them ‘The Three Musketeers’ and then they’re all still standing, as fate would have it, but we’re not sure about this one.”

The commonality between Hollywood’s Grand Lady and the Gables’ Biltmore is striking: Both were built in the 1920s and were considered the Grand Dame hotel properties in their heyday. The structures were also utilized during World War II and as time went by languished into a state of disrepair. The Breakers in Palm Beach experienced a similar fate and was ultimately restored.

Unlike its counterparts, which have had their exteriors restored and interiors modernized, the Hollywood Beach Resort Hotel remains a shell of itself.

Two weekends ago, Dave Noell, 81, took what he called his farewell tour in Hollywood, where he lived from 1949 until 1977. “I have great memories of it,” he said of the hotel. “I used to go there a lot. People from up north would come to visit and we’d take them there with all the shops. It was a place that we always took for granted, I guess.”

“It’s had a nice history with the service personnel during the war. It’s quite the lady,” he said. “I’d hate to see it taken down or whatever they’re going to try and do with it.”

Thwarted development attempts

Since its heyday, the hotel has seen many lives: It was once the home of Florida Bible College, the site of a movie theater and later a mall, and eventually became timeshare-operated condos.

With the collapse of Champlain Towers South in Surfside, Taylor said some timeshare owners began “facing the grim reality that they’re in a 100-year-old building that’s not been well maintained, and it’s probably going to be looking at major assessments.”

“This kind of convinced people that were strong holdouts, it might be time to sell because their condos weren’t worth as much as what the assessments were going to be,” he said.

Camejo said with the parking garage and the building now owned by two separate entities, the property will likely become easier to develop. “We’re down basically to two individual property interests as opposed to several thousand as we had previous,” he said, adding there is optimism around the property because fewer controlling interests are attached to it.

But that matter is still complicated. According to a lawsuit filed Nov. 30, 2022, Florida-based real estate development and equity firm Equishares, Inc., sued New York-based real estate firm The Chetrit Group, alleging Chetrit attempted to cut Equishares out of a deal to develop the hotel, which sits between a string of hotels and condos along Ocean Drive.

The lawsuit claims Equishares identified the property as the potential site for development as early as 2018 and brought The Chetrit Group into the deal in 2019. But as negotiations were being completed to buy the properties, the lawsuit alleges The Chetrit Group began purchasing the timeshares and condominium units inside the hotel in an effort to retain controlling interest in the homeowners association and eventually dissolve it without notifying Equishares.

Camejo said no plans have been submitted to the city to develop the property.

Attorneys representing Equishare declined to comment citing pending litigation. Allen Levine, who represents The Chetrit Group, said the lawsuit had no merit, and his clients are continuing with development plans.

“My client is working to determine what the next steps are,” he said, adding the litigation process is not affecting that.

Restore or demolish?

But as the hotel’s future is uncertain, Hollywood natives and occasional visitors wonder what will become of it. No plans for development have been submitted to the city, but some surmise the structure may be torn down to make way for high-rises.

Longtime Hollywood resident Jonas Caufield, 55, said he believes it would be cost prohibitive to renovate the hotel, as many would want, because of the age of the building. “You’re talking probably millions and millions of dollars to try to bring the building back to its former glory.” He instead suggested maybe a park that would benefit the community or a low-rise development

“But no more condos or apartments. I mean, this place is just saturated already,” he said.

Lewis said while he would like to see the building preserved, he’s “led to believe that that structure must be rotting from the core,” echoing similar concerns about the collapse in Surfside. “But I’d be really sad if they demolished it.”

The building has a code violation for its failure to comply with the Broward County building code and inspection program, according to the city. Some individual units inside the structure also have code violations, the city said. A 50-year recertification was conducted on the building in 2022 and indicated that the building needed structural and electrical repairs, according to the recertification report.

Taylor said he wouldn’t be surprised if the hotel was demolished and the front recreated or incorporated into a new building. “We feel like it would be a shame to lose the structure when other cities get to have their grand dame hotels,” he said.

The structure, Taylor said, is one of the most important buildings left standing that Young built after the Park View Hotel and the First National Bank of Hollywood were demolished. The Great Southern was torn down in 2020 but rebuilt to mimic the original’s exterior and with a more modern interior.

“This hotel is the last Mohican from Joseph Young Companies that he built,” he said.

Camejo said there has been conversation about the importance of paying tribute to the existing building. “The site itself is probably the most important piece of real estate in Hollywood,” he said. “It’s a landmark property.”

Another change that would need to happen includes removing the loop that leads drivers along Hollywood Boulevard and onto Ocean Drive, where the front lawn of the property once sat. Camejo said there have been conversations with the Florida Department of Transportation to change the intersection.

And with the Hollywood CRA set to sunset in 2027, Camejo said it’s important to have a plan approved by the city commission so that the level of CRA’s participation can be determined. Money generated from the CRA goes toward funding projects in the city’s downtown and beach areas.

“That building and that site should become economically relevant, again,” he said. “We can and should be able to do way better than what we have, architecturally, aesthetically, economically. All boxes need to be checked off.”

As for Hogan: “I’d like to see it go back to what it was when I was in high school,” she said. “It was so beautiful — it had the beautiful shops downstairs and wonderful restaurants.”