How a secretive couple used fame and fortune to put Florida’s Diplomat Hotel on the map

Miami Beach had the Fontainebleau in the hotel heyday of South Florida. But a 30-minute drive north brought you to the Diplomat in Hollywood, opened in 1958 and soon filled with famous entertainers singing in its nightclubs.

Sinatra. Minnelli. Sammy Davis Jr. They all brought the glam to Hollywood, Florida.

The hotel also had its own celebrities: the owners. While protective of their privacy, they also could be seen across the resort, making sure all was running smoothly and, of course, taking photos with visiting entertainers and dignitaries as well as mingling with regular tourists. And it didn’t always go smoothly, with a series of fires and painful repairs and renovations.

The original Diplomat stood for 40 years, before the demolition crews arrived and made way for a new, gleaming tower, which was just sold for $835 million.

While the new owners plot the resort’s future, let’s take a look at the past through the Miami Herald archives.

Diplomat’s innkeepers: The Cowans

Published Dec. 30, 1984

By Yolanda W. Woodlee

They met on a blind date at the Fontainebleau Hotel swimming pool.

Friends introduced Irving Cowan, a 22-year-old cattle-buyer from Bartow, to Marge Friedland, a rich schoolgirl with a good figure who looked older than her 14 years.

A year and a half later, Marge, then 16, and Irv were married at the same hotel.

The romance born at the swank Miami Beach hotel 30 years ago has matured into a multimillion-dollar partnership at another ritzy hotel - the Diplomat on Hollywood Beach, one of the few hotels that still makes a claim to glamour. Bob Hope, who’ll perform there on New Year’s Eve, calls the show there “THE way to bring in the New Year.”

The Diplomat’s influence is felt from the Chamber of Commerce to City Hall. It’s Hollywood’s largest private-sector employer, with 1,400 people on the payroll. It’s Broward’s largest hotel and brings in 10 percent of the county’s bed tax - money used to promote tourism.

Irv Cowan is the president. Marge Cowan is the executive. He is reserved, stiff. He makes sure the hotel operates efficiently. She is relaxed, creative. She makes certain the hotel offers a personal touch, such as the chocolate-coated strawberries in every room.

They share an office suite on the mezzanine of the family- owned and operated hotel. They share a double-desk office in their nine-bathroom home.

They socialize with the likes of Peggy Lee, Sammy Davis Jr. and Liza Minnelli. Artist Andy Warhol has painted Marge Cowan’s portrait.

Since he was named executive president of the Diplomat Hotel in 1960, Irving Cowan has worked to make it, in his eyes, South Florida’s one-stop paradise. That means top-name entertainment and spending $20 million to refurbish the hotel after two major fires and two minor ones in eight months.

Co-owners of a nationally renowned hotel, co-producers of an unsuccessful Broadway musical and backers of legalized gambling in an anti-gambling state, the Cowans are often found at the center of public controversy in South Florida. Angry elderly protesters recently convinced the Hollywood City Commission to block the Cowans’ plan to turn the Diplomat golf course into a housing development.

Maybe, because their work is so public, they jealously guard their privacy. Calls to their office are automatically transferred to the hotel’s public relations director. Their home phone number is private. A security guard in the driveway greets visitors to their home. If Marge and Irv don’t want to talk to you, they don’t.

“Once we close the door to our house, we try to keep the business outside,” Irv Cowan said. “We’ve managed to keep our business life and our home life separate.”

When the Cowans met at the Fontainebleau during the 1950s, it was Miami Beach’s swankiest nightspot, where renowned entertainers and well-to-do Jewish residents mingled.

Both were part of that society. She was born into it, he worked his way in.

Marge Friedland was the youngest child and only daughter of Hattie and Samuel Friedland, board chairman and founder of the Food Fair-Pantry Pride supermarket chain. She had skipped a couple of grades before she graduated at age 15 from Whitefield High, a private Miami Beach school.

Irving Cohen, his surname when they were married, was an ambitious, hard-working teenager. After school, he had jobs digging ditches on Collins Avenue, busing trays in an Italian restaurant and even bagging groceries at Food Fair.

He studied business administration at the University of Miami before enlisting in the Coast Guard. He returned to work for his father, Joseph Cohen, in the family’s thriving meat- packing business.

Irv was one of the youngest cattle buyers in Florida in the 1950s. “I was a cowboy,” he says of those boring days in Bartow, a small town in Central Florida. He met Marge on a weekend trip to Miami. They courted by telephone and visits until they were married in December 1956.

Two years later, his father-in-law built the Diplomat. Friedland wanted family to manage it, but no relatives were hoteliers. Remembering the prestige and enchantment of the Fontainebleau, the couple decided to try it for a year and loved it. They also decided to change their last name because there was another hotelman named Irving Cohen.

A quarter of a century later, the Cowans have turned the Diplomat into an oceanfront landmark that attracts royalty and high-ranking statesmen.

President Reagan addressed the International Longshoremen’s Association at the Diplomat last year. After renting two floors at the hotel, Saudi Arabian Sheik Mohamed al-Fassi was arrested for not paying his $1.4 million tab. He unsuccessfully sued the Diplomat for $1 trillion in 1982.

While events at the Diplomat keep reporters pacing the lobby, the Cowans rarely permit a closer look at their personal lives.

Irv is reserved, not relaxed like Marge, when they walk through the 1,160-room Diplomat. They occasionally steal a kiss, and he always reaches for her hand at stairs. He stands with his back so straight that he could be wearing a back brace.

The Cowans, married 28 years, parents of Debbie, 26, Cindy, 25, and Jonathon, 9, will become grandparents for the first time in February. Marge, 44, wearing purple sunglasses with her once- long brunette hair now blond, short and feathered, drives to the Diplomat in a maroon-colored Porsche.

“I enjoy life. I don’t think I’m extravagant to the point that I’m opulent,” she says, two gold bracelets clanging together as she gestures.

When she talks, she raises her eyebrows and tilts her head to the right, like a teenager talking confidentially to her best friend. She frequently interrupts her sentences with, “You know what I mean.”

At their Hollywood-by-the-Sea home - one mile from the Diplomat on the Intracoastal Waterway - the butler serves hot tea on a porcelain platter. “It’s too dark; can you make it lighter?” she asks. “Never mind. I’ll have iced tea. Thank you.”

At home, the Cowans can get “real funky,” as she says. He trades his suit for jeans. They play tennis on their tennis court and go out in the speed boat.

At dinner, the family tries not to talk about work, but that can be difficult when the hotel business is the fabric of family life, said Cindy, who lives at home.

Cindy, who is the hotel’s director of touring, says that as the bosses’ daughter, “you feel like everyone is watching you. I definitely don’t get any special privileges. My salary started like everyone else’s - at the bottom.”

At least three days a week, the family eats together in the emerald green dining room. Sometimes they sit at the bar next to the game room, where pictures of the Cowans with Presidents Truman, Ford, Carter and Reagan march across a table.

Irv Cowan is generally proclaimed as one of the czars of the South Florida hotel industry, but his horizon stretches beyond the penthouse suite. He is a director and a major stockholder of City National Bank of Florida and chairman of Royal Palm Beach Colony Inc., a primary developer of a village of the same name in Palm Beach County.

He also owns and operates 6,000 acres of orange groves in Palm Beach County. The Cowans own the 255-room Shelborne Hotel in Miami Beach, a thoroughbred race horse in Chile and seven other horses in Europe. Marge Cowan divides her time between the couple’s youngest child, chairing fundraising events and sitting on advisory boards at Nova University and Broward Community College.

While the couple’s successes are numerous, they have failed at other costly business ventures.

For years, Irv Cowan has been trying to bring casino gambling to South Florida. Six years ago, despite talk that casinos would attract organized crime, Irv and his wife’s father, Friedland, pumped close to $750,000 into a campaign led by several powerful hotel owners to legalize gambling in Florida. Voters decided against it by an overwhelming 2-1 vote, but Cowan hasn’t quit. Last fall, along with several other hotel owners, he started a new drive to bring casinos to South Florida.

In 1981, a court decision blocked efforts by the Cowans, Friedland and Miami business associate Ronald Fine to turn Miami’s Watson Island into a $55 million amusement park.

The Cowans tried unsuccessfully to bring the Buffalo Braves basketball team to the Hollywood Sportatorium in 1976. But the owner decided not to sell the team when Buffalo sued to keep the Braves.

Last year, the Cowans co-produced a Broadway musical called Peg with Zev Bufman. The show was based on the autobiography of their friend, Peggy Lee. It flopped after five performances.

Irv Cowan casually dismisses the play’s failure, saying that people just don’t appreciate a personality’s life story until that person is dead.

Bob Hope, very much alive, will make a one-night appearance in the hotel’s Regency Ballroom on Monday. He performed there New Year’s Eve 1978. He recalls, “the other time I was there , I enjoyed it. And I’m so anxious to get back.”

Booking top-name entertainers isn’t profitable, but the Cowans like the image the stars give the hotel.

“It’s more for the ability to create the atmosphere that I think people enjoy when they are on vacation,” Irv Cowan said. “Ambiance. It’s nice to go the pool and see Burt Bacharach sitting there. People like that.”

When celebrities appear at the Diplomat, they’re often more to the Cowans than just paid performers. They’re friends.

Liza Minnelli usually stops by the Diplomat when she’s in South Florida. Her mother performed there. Sammy Davis Jr. was best man when the Cowans renewed their marriage vows at their 20th wedding anniversary. Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis, for instance, met the Cowans when they were singing with the Fifth Dimension at the hotel 12 years ago.

They describe the Cowans as experts in the entertainment industry and as a fun-loving couple after working hours. Before McCoo decided to host the television show Solid Gold, she talked to the Cowans.

“People we count as true friends are the people who will tell us what they truly think,” McCoo said. “Marge will come and say, ‘You know, Marilyn, I don’t think that song suits you as well as others I heard you do.’ She’s tactful.”

Humorous, too, McCoo said, recalling a night of frolicking in a New York hotel with the Cowans.

“We were all hungry and trying to decide what to send out for,” McCoo said. “Marge was saying, why don’t we send out for fried chicken. I said I had a taste for bagels and lox. Marge said, ‘Isn’t there something a little off here?’ “ They ordered both.

The stars add glitter to the Hollywood resort on the ocean. And the Cowans get both credit and criticism.

“They really do give Hollywood a good name,” City Commissioner Suzanne Gunzburger said. “I think the Diplomat projects the type of image Hollywood wants; upscale . . . upbeat.”

Broward County Commissioner Nicki Grossman said Irv Cowan definitely influences South Florida tourism with the national conventions and headliner attractions he brings to the Diplomat.

But, she said, “He has a certain bias. He is first and foremost a partisan for the Diplomat Hotel. If he thinks something is going to compete with the Diplomat, he opposes it.”

“I don’t want my dollars used where we’re not going to get any benefits from it,” Cowan said. “There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s common sense.”

The Diplomat gets its business in the form of everything from national conventions to local bar mitzvahs, weddings and charity banquets. The hotel uses 3,000 pounds of linen a month, 22,000 eggs a week and prepares 200 gallons of soup a day.

After four fires and a four-month closing, the Diplomat reopened in September with a $20 million renovation of everything from the lobby to the penthouse suite. (Irv Cowan estimated that the hotel lost $150,000 a day while it was closed.) That included construction of a $4.5 million beachfront Polynesian Gardens, a maze of cave-like rocks with built-in whirlpools and a tree top lounge.

“Although the (Diplomat) isn’t in Miami Beach, the Diplomat and Fontainebleau have been like bookends,” said Fontainebleau owner Steve Muss, a friend and competitor.

While Muss and Irv Cowan talk about beefing up tourism in South Florida, they don’t often discuss the conventions each is trying to land.

Muss said he bumped heads with the Cowans on a hotel deal a couple of years ago. The Fontainebleau once owned a corporate jet and flew some businessmen down to look over the hotel as a site for a planned major convention.

They looked at the Fontainebleau and decided to take a drive north -- to the Diplomat. They later booked their convention at the Hollywood hotel, leaving the Fontainebleau with a $17,000 tab for travel expenses.

“I’ve been wondering how to charge the Diplomat,” Muss said, laughing. “That’s healthy competition. I have never asked Mr. Cowan to reimburse me, nor will I ever.”

The Cowans still visit the Fontainebleau for dinner occasionally.

“It’s sort of like a businessman’s holiday,” Irv Cowan says.

Celebrity scrapbook photos

After a fire

Published Feb. 14, 1984

By Mike Sante

A few hours after Hollywood’s Diplomat Hotel threw open its doors Monday afternoon, Sol Kozol poked his head into the spacious lobby and looked around.

Kozol, an outgoing dentist from Boston, sighed with relief when he confirmed that the huge golden chandelier, marble floors and plush sofas hadn’t perished in the Oct. 27 fire he had heard so much about.

“We were afraid the place had been destroyed,” Kozol said. “This is one of the few hotels remaining that has kept that old charm, and any time something like this happens, you fear a piece of the past has been lost.”

The massive hotel’s lobby was clean, bright and cheery Monday, a far cry from the dark, smoke-filled cavern guests had fled 119 days earlier.

The fire began when a carelessly discarded match or cigarette ignited trash in a basement storeroom, fire officials say.

The blaze never got out of the basement, and no one was seriously hurt, but it destroyed much of the hotel’s electrical room and wiped out the Diplomat’s supply of linen and food.

On Monday, the hotel reopened about half of its 705 guest rooms, one bar and a restaurant. It expects all of its shops, cafes, guest rooms and convention rooms to be in operation by March 1.

Hotel managers were nonchalant about opening the doors again. There were no sounds of celebration and no ceremonies. That will come Sept. 1, when the place re-reopens.

The Diplomat, 3515 S. Ocean Dr., will shut down again July 1 for more renovations that will bring the total cost of repairs and improvements to more than $20 million.

Owner Irving Cowan estimated the hotel lost $150,000 every day it remained closed, which amounts to almost $18 million now.

Its managers will try to save what’s left of this winter’s tourist season, but a few rough edges remain to be smoothed.

The hotel, complained Howard and Phyllis Green, of Worchester, Mass., “was considerably less organized than usual.”

Most guests checking in Monday were elderly tourists. No big meetings are booked into Broward’s largest convention center until March.

Telephone repairmen and nervous hotel managers were everywhere.

Small piles of sand, shattered concrete and debris lay around the edge of the pool deck.

Employees ferried cases of beer and soda pop through the lobby. (The 2,000 hot dogs and 15 kegs of beer for Saturday night’s eight-match boxing card will be trucked in today.)

The hotel has rehired about half the 500 workers it laid off after the fire, Diplomat spokesperson Alice Foster said. That brings the work force to 750, about half the 1,400 employees the Diplomat usually employs at the peak of the season.

Because Monday was too momentous to ignore completely, the hotel set up an afternoon champagne buffet in the lobby.

Trays of cheese and crackers were emptied in minutes.

A waiter bringing pastries was mobbed in a tangle of elbows.

After the initial crush, a short woman in a pale-blue sweater and matching pants made two runs at the croissants.

A friend stuffed the rolls in a handbag.

Harold Haver, a 58-year-old banquet porter pouring complimentary champagne punch, didn’t care.

He spent a month on unemployment before getting a job bussing tables at a North Dade country club, but the minimum- wage job couldn’t match the $4.58 an hour he made at the Diplomat.

Said Haver: “Thank goodness we’re back to work again.”

Forcing guests out

Published June 13, 1984

By Mike Sante

More than 1,000 conventioneers fled the Diplomat Hotel Tuesday after the second storeroom fire in eight months filled parts of the Hollywood resort with smoke.

No one was injured as dense smoke drifted through the lobby of the 703-room hotel at 3515 S. Ocean Dr. The hotel reopened about two hours after the fire was reported at 5:41 p.m.

The blaze, which gutted two rooms on the mezzanine level directly above the lobby, was deliberately set, Hollywood Fire Chief James Ward said. But fire marshals had not determined late Tuesday how it started.

No damage estimate was available, but it will be far less than the $5 million from the October fire, which began with a carelessly discarded cigarette in a basement storeroom. The hotel was closed until Feb. 13.

The Diplomat had been scheduled to close in July for renovations and additional repairs, then reopen in September.

Ward said Tuesday’s fire started in a 15-by-20-foot storeroom filled with pamphlets and mimeograph paper.

“I smelled smoke and looked behind me, and I could see bright orange light through the windows (of the storeroom),” said Stacie Gruttadauria, a temporary secretary from Fort Lauderdale hired for the convention.Hotel guests were warned about the fire with a tape- recorded message set off by the hotel’s new, half-million- dollar smoke alarm system, which Fire Chief Ward had ordered installed after the October fire.

The smoke alarm system, 90 percent complete, was not working on the mezzanine level.

Hotel employees alerted Fire Marshal Bob Lebanowitz, who was in the hotel garage, by walkie-talkie. Hollywood has required the Diplomat to have at least one firefighter at the hotel at all times until installation of the alarm system is complete.

Lebanowitz rushed to the mezzanine, saw the blaze and radioed the fire department for help.

Then he and Nurace Sundar, a hotel maintenance worker, grabbed a hotel fire hose and poured water on the flames until the first of four fire trucks arrived five minutes later.

Within minutes, the fire was out, Ward said.

Diplomat owner Irving Cowan stood on the steps of the hotel, drinking a can of iced tea as employees set up large fans to clear the smoke.

Cowan said he felt “snake bit” and discouraged by the hotel’s string of bad luck.

Impatient guests

Published Sept. 28, 1984

By Andrew Froman

Officially it’s called the Diplomat Hotel Resort & Country Clubs.

But the giant hotel and convention center on Hollywood Beach got called a lot of other names Thursday by angry guests left holding their bags and waiting for rooms.

“They stink. Their system stinks,” said David Kogen, 76, of Tamarac. “They book you a room and then you can’t get in.”

“This is the most disgraceful thing I’ve ever seen,” said Sara Kaplan of Sunrise.

Kogen and Kaplan were two of an estimated 800 guests the Diplomat was trying to accommodate Thursday afternoon for a weekend celebration of the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashana.

The group, organized by Sunrise Lakes Phase One Condominium, has convened at the Diplomat, 3515 S. Ocean Dr., for the holiday the last six years. Hundreds from the group, and hundreds more from a scheduled convention, were left waiting in the lobby for several hours Thursday.

The problem, Diplomat spokeswoman Alice Foster said, was Tropical Storm Isidore and a previous convention for 1,600 insurance salesmen.

“We had 1,600 people leaving this morning. Of course, with the weather they were delayed getting out,” Foster said. “Then we had 800 (from the condo) coming in, and they all came, or a great number of them, en masse.”

To ease the pain of waiting, the Diplomat provided free liquor and soft drinks.

Most would-be guests crowding the lobby were not placated. They said they expected hotel personnel to be ready for them when they came to claim their rooms at the prescribed time.

“They charge like a first-class hotel and give service like a second-class hotel,” said Neil Harrington of Daytona Beach.

Harrington was one of 800 other conventioneers -- public school librarians from across the state here for a weekend meeting of the Florida Association for Media in Education.

For several hours Wednesday night and again most of Thursday, members of their group crammed the Diplomat lobby.

Frazzled bellhops picked their way around piles of luggage as desk clerks shouted the names of guests whose rooms were ready.

An exasperated reservations clerk pleaded for restraint from impatient guests lining up in front of him.

“Please just come to the desk when your name is called,” the clerk said. “Don’t keep asking me for your room if your name hasn’t been called.”

Many ignored him.

“I showed them my medicine, told them I had a heart condition,” Sam Kaplan said. “Then they gave me a room key.”

Most of the grumbling crowd had finally been accommodated by 4 p.m., three hours after check-in time.

“They don’t plan. They don’t put on enough staff. They overbook,” Harrington said. “We have been pleading for years not to have to come down here because we get treated like this every year.”

Diplomat goes out with a bang

Published April 18, 1998

By Anne Martinez

With a series of deafening booms and an awesome cloud of dust, the landmark Diplomat Resort and Country Club came down Friday the same way it rose to national fame -- amid much hype and revelry.

Blast gazers closed in on South Ocean Drive in Hollywood, flocking in droves on foot and by car, bike and boat to watch 40 years of South Florida history crumble in a few, fleeting moments.

For some, the event marked the end of an era that brought glitz and glamour to the former five-star hotel, where entertainers such as Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason and Bob Hope performed.

“It’s like watching an old, good friend pass away,” said George Baker, 78, once a frequent Diplomat guest, as he watched from a yacht chartered by the demolition company. “She was class. And that’s the way she went to her grave - with class.”

On shore, groups of retirees, families with babies in strollers, students on spring break and workers playing hooky all came to see the 22-second implosion that jump-started the construction of a massive, $400 million rebirth.

In place of the signature white towers, the Washington, D.C.-based Plumbers and Pipefitters International Union, which bought the hotel last year, plans to build a 39-story convention hotel resort with neighboring condominiums and an entertainment complex.

On Friday, about 350 people squeezed toward barricades straddling State Road A1A just north of the Diplomat. Hundreds of others watched from around the hotel in lawn chairs on the beach, balconies, rooftops and on yachts offshore. Helicopters hovered above.

Shortly after 11 a.m., the show began:

A barely audible siren off in the distance signaled the start. A series of powerful booms followed. Then, silence.

Seconds later, a few more blasts sent the 15-story south tower melting to the ground in a wave quickly followed by the nine-story north tower. Crowds cheered as the ground shook beneath them and the sounds of crumbling concrete dissipated into an enormous dust cloud that quickly traveled northwest toward a crowd of gazers.

In what looked like a scene from the horror film classic The Blob , people ran from the growing brown, gritty cloud. Some wore face masks. Others pulled their shirts over their faces as they retreated.

“That’s a hell of a bomb,” said Paul Nixon, a retired Hallandale firefighter, as he rode his bicycle away from the fast-approaching dust cloud.

The entire event was caught on tape, not only by local television stations, but also by a local film company for posterity. A Japanese film crew, TV Asahi in Tokyo, also filmed the implosion as part of a two-hour documentary on the Diplomat.

About 500 pounds of explosives and 1,600 charges were used to collapse the buildings into their basements. What remained above ground was a modest pile of rubble and small, gritty debris scattered across South Ocean Drive. Police reopened the road to traffic shortly before 1 p.m.

Workers will spend the next three weeks hauling away the debris. Construction of the hotel’s foundations is expected to begin in June, said Tom Driscoll, Diplomat’s president. The hotel, once known to ring in the new year with extravagant galas, is scheduled to reopen for New Year’s Eve 1999.“I think every body enjoyed the show,” said Doug Loizeaux, vice president of Controlled Demolition International, the Maryland-based implosion contractor. “It was picture-perfect.”

Well, not exactly.

A few stray rocks pierced windows and glass doors at the Sea Air Towers, the Diplomat’s closest neighbor to the south. Residents of the Sea Air condominiums were evacuated early Friday and returned in midafternoon.

That wasn’t soon enough for some residents.

“It’s not fair,” said Gonzalo Padron, who is vacationing at the Sea Air Towers. “We’re losing a day just because they want to finish construction early.”

Driscoll said breaking down the towers piece by piece would have taken an extra two months, and would have made a lot of noise.

In February, workers began tearing down the Diplomat’s periphery structures, including the swimming pool and the Cafe Cristal, where Sammy Davis Jr. and Liza Minelli once performed together and Sinatra crooned to adoring crowds.

Those were the days when people dressed up for dinner, slipping into silver-colored satin dresses with chinchilla trim and stiletto heels, said Phyllis Termini. A resident of Bal Harbour in Miami-Dade County, she reminisced about dancing in the Diplomat’s swinging Tack Room.

“It was the showplace of South Florida, and look at it now -- rubble,” said Joan Lapi, of Hallandale. “But we’ve got to look to the future now and make room for the new one.”

For Broward, the new hotel and shopping/entertainment complex will mean 2,100 jobs and an additional $4.7 million in property taxes each year. The complex is also expected to generate $2.1 million in tourist tax revenues.

The Diplomat, built in 1958 by Samuel Friedland, founder of the Food Fair-Pantry Pride supermarket chain, closed in 1991 after more than five years of financial troubles and management changes.

Memories of the hotel’s heyday are etched in Arleene Martin’s mind.

“I had tears in my eyes when it came down,” said Martin, whose recollections of the Diplomat span more than 25 years. “It’s the end of a landmark.”

New Diplomat rises from the rubble

Published Dec. 31, 1998

By Julie Kay

In a massive pile of rubble, concrete and metal lurk the ghosts of a bygone era. Drive by the remains of the Diplomat Hotel on New Year’s Eve and listen for the sounds of glasses clinking, people laughing and headliners like Liza Minnelli, Bob Hope and Frank Sinatra singing.

Once the grand dame of Hollywood Beach, the place to party on New Year’s Eve and catch the biggest acts in the nation, the Diplomat Hotel was imploded in April.

But rising from the dust is the promise of a return to the glory days. A new Diplomat Resort & Country Club is being built upon the rubble, a 39-story twin-tower hotel with 1,000 rooms and a convention center.

The $500 million project was fittingly scheduled for completion by New Year’s Eve 1999. Now a bit behind schedule, it’s expected to open in the summer of 2000, said Edward Tupling, vice president of development for Driscoll Development, which is building the hotel.

The new Diplomat has booked 15 conventions through 2005, including the National Association of Bond Lawyers, the International Council of Shopping Centers and the American Society for Testing Materials. The conventions total 80,000 room nights and should earn the club $260 million. Mary Huddleston, vice president of marketing and sales for the Diplomat, said the resort has met its sales goals so far.

“We’ve had some delays with the permitting process, but we’re going full steam ahead,” Tupling said. “This is a fast-track construction project. We’re building a small city here.”

Two hundred workers toil from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. six days a week - longer than the city normally allows. After the dramatic implosion observed by hundreds, workers have poured the foundation for the building and are in the process of installing the pilings.

Before closing in 1991, the Diplomat poured millions of dollars into city coffers and employed 1,400 during the high season, making it Hollywood’s largest private employer during its glory days.

Highlights:

- Lawrence Welk filmed his first TV show in Florida from the Diplomat in 1962.

- Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, his wife, and his mother, Rose Kennedy, attended the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library Charity Ball in 1965. And Arthur Godfrey taped his popular CBS radio show from the Tack Room.

- In 1966, Judy Garland played the hotel’s Cafe Cristal.

- New Year’s Eve was the night of the year at the Diplomat. In 1976, Sammy Davis Jr. and Liza Minnelli did their first joint concert. A record 3,200 attended.

Then, the bad news.

After a series of arson fires in 1983, the Diplomat went on a downward slide. It was closed permanently in 1991, creating a dismal effect on area businesses: a one-third drop in sales and a decline in bed, sales and property taxes.

But the news that the United Association of Plumbers, Pipefitters and Sprinklerfitters was buying the hotel in 1997 encouraged Hollywood leaders, who hoped for a rebirth.

“I can only say that it’s a keystone of Hollywood. Its enormity may not make it as personal as it was,” Hollywood City Commissioner Sal Oliveri said. “Its size will make it somewhat more prestigious, more of a destination.

“I’ve always been a little concerned about the height of the hotel, which is going to be higher than other buildings there, but when all is said and done, it will certainly enhance the identity of Hollywood,” he said.

Upon completion, the Diplomat will create 2,100 permanent jobs in Broward, with a potential to invigorate the retail market along Hollywood beach by an additional $28 million of tourist spending in the first year. It is projected to generate close to $2.1 million in bed tax revenues.

In addition to the hotel, a luxury condominium of 107 units is planned as the third building on the 15 acres on the ocean side of State Road A1A. On the 12 acres to the west, plans call for retail shops, restaurants, parking and future condominiums.

Hotel highlights

Here are some key dates in the Diplomat’s history:

- 1958: Samuel Friedland, founder of the Food Fair supermarket chain, builds the Diplomat on South Ocean Drive.

- 1982: Saudi Arabian Sheik Mohammed al-Fassi rents two floors at the Diplomat and is arrested after trying to skip out on a $1.4 million tab. He unsuccessfully sues the hotel for $1 trillion.

- 1983-84: The hotel is closed for the winter season after several fires lead to losses of $30 million in business and $20 million in renovations. After it reopens, former President Ronald Reagan addresses the International Longshoremen’s Association convention at the Diplomat. Bob Hope performs at the hotel’s 1984 New Year’s Eve gala.

- 1987: The hotel almost runs out of operating capital and can’t pay about 200 creditors. Irving Cowan gives up control to a consortium of labor union pension funds whose managers agree to bail out the hotel with a $44 million loan.

- June 1988: Harbaugh Hotels of Palm Springs, Calif., a management company hired by the lenders, begins renovating the hotel.

- January 1990: Financial troubles persist. The hotel’s lenders file a foreclosure suit but later drop it, paving the way for new financing.

- May 30, 1991: The 1,000-room Diplomat is sold to one of its lenders: the Union Labor Life Insurance Co. The company announces it will close the hotel for 16 months to renovate it and then reopen, but the hotel remains closed.

- July 1997: The Plumbers and Pipefitters International Union announces it has reached a tentative agreement to buy the hotel.

- October 1997: The hotel is sold.

- December 1997: The Diplomat hires the Coral Gables-based architectural firm Nichols Brosch Sandoval & Associates to design the new 1,000-room convention hotel and retail complex.

- April 17: Thousands of onlookers watch the historic hotel collapse into rubble. Five hundred pounds of dynamite are used to implode it, clearing the way for the new project.