From ritzy to ratty and back again to ritzy,
St. Petersburg’s Vinoy Park Hotel has come
full circle. Historic Vinoy Hotel is ready for
glory days to check back in.

The Vinoy Renaissance St. Petersburg Resort & Golf Club: fountain on the west side of the building
[St. Petersburg Times photo]

By Harry Wessel, Sentinel Staff
Orlando Sentinel

published July 21 1992

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The 66-year-old Soreno Hotel met its maker in January, its explosive destruction providing the finale for Lethal Weapon III. Demolition began Saturday on an even older landmark, the 104-year-old "Ormond Hotel" in Ormond Beach.

It has been a year of bad news for Florida’s historic hotels, but some good news is just around the corner. Next week the "Vinoy Park Hotel", which completed its original construction a few months before the nearby Soreno, will reopen for business after 18 years of dormancy.

The restoration, plus new construction to develop the renamed "Stouffer Vinoy Resort" into a modern, top-of-the-line hotel, has taken 2 1/2 years and $93 million.

The Vinoy, which opens July 31, easily could have shared the same fate as the Soreno and the Ormond. Closed and all but abandoned in 1974, the vintage 1925 waterfront resort was trashed and vandalized, its plaster walls filled with graffiti.

“The ballroom was the world’s largest pigeon roost,” recalled the Vinoy’s majority owner, New York developer Frederick Guest, of his first tour of the hotel 10 years ago. “Half the (ballroom’s) ceiling was on the floor. It was pretty depressing. Anything decorative on the walls had been pried off and taken home. Kids had partied in there, and there were piles of beer cans.”

Guest, then 42, wasn’t old enough to recall the Vinoy in its heyday, when Calvin Coolidge, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Babe Ruth and other rich and famous guests visited the resort, which opened for three months a year during the winter tourist season.

It first opened its doors at 7 p.m., Dec. 31, 1925, after just 10 months of construction. The salmon-pink Vinoy, owned by Pennsylvania oilman Aymer Vinoy Laughner, was built in the eclectic "Mediterranean revival" style popularized by Palm Beach architect Addison Mizner. The $3.5 million resort stood on prime Tampa Bay waterfront, across from what is now The Pier.

During World War II the hotel was used as a military facility. It steadily declined after the war, and by the time it was closed in 1975 its rooms were being rented for $7 a night.

After several years of sales, resales and various schemes that went nowhere, along came Frederick Guest, great-grandson of steel magnate Henry Phipps. It took Guest seven more years of frustrating on-again, off-again partnerships before he linked up with the "Stouffer Hotel Co." chain to get his renovation project started. His architect was William Cox of Coral Gables, who had restored the "Boca Raton Hotel" in the 1970’s.

Cox said the restoration work, which began in early 1990, came just in time for the Vinoy. “The condition had deteriorated to the point where if something hadn’t been done it would have had to be demolished. When a building is that close to the sea, it’s like a docked boat: If you ignore it long enough, it will disappear.”

Working with photographs and fragments of what was left, artisans reconstructed or restored the plaster walls, ceilings, cornices, medallions and hundreds of other architectural details in the first floor’s public spaces.

Even more challenging was the work that Vinoy guests will never see - installing the wiring, plumbing and air-conditioning necessary to a modern hotel. In some cases Cox and his architects had to fudge to make do. The lobby’s ceiling was lowered 3 inches and its walls expanded with false cabinet fronts to allow room for bulky air ducts.

(The lobby’s trademark "pecky cypress" beams had to be taken down and rehung in the original place.)

The Vinoy damaged dining room.
– Courtesy of the Vinoy Renaissance Resort

Historic preservationists like what they see.

“It’s a class act,” said Scott Gerloff, director of "Historic Hotels of America", a program run by the non-profit, 250,000-member "National Trust for Historic Preservation".

“The majority of the original architecture of the building has been preserved, and the new additions show respect to the original structure,” Gerloff said in a telephone interview from his Washington office.

Walter Marder, a staff architect with the Florida Bureau of Historic Preservation who has closely followed the Vinoy renovation, also was impressed.

“I’ve seldom been involved with a project that has spent this much time to restore the old materials, old designs and finishes,” he said. “These guys haven’t skimped at all.”

The Vinoy is listed in the "National Register of Historic Places" and is one of 75 "Historic Hotels of America" listed by the "National Trust for Historic Preservation". Membership is based on "historical character, architectural quality and the outstanding preservation efforts made by owners and managers . . . " (Florida has four other members: The Don Cesar in St. Petersburg Beach, the Brazilian Court in Palm Beach, the Ritz Plaza Hotel in Miami Beach and La Concha in Key West.)

But the restoration, as faithful as it was, was limited to the hotel’s exterior and first floor public spaces - the lobby, main dining room and ballroom. The floors above were completely overhauled, with the original 375 guest rooms reconfigured into 258 (each including three telephones, two televisions and one hair dryer).

To make up for the rooms lost in the conversion, a new, seven-story "tower" was built adjacent to the main building with 102 additional rooms.

Vince LaRuffa, the Stouffer Vinoy’s general sales manager, said the historic restoration is an important aspect of the resort’s marketing strategy.

But, he pointed out, most of the $93 million was spent on new additions, including a parking garage, a 74-slip marina, two pools, five restaurants, a 16-court tennis complex (including two grass courts), two croquet

courts, a fully equipped fitness center and a private golf course - scheduled for completion Sept. 1 - (1 1/2
miles away).

LaRuffa expects the resort to do more than half its business with small-and medium-sized corporate groups. Nightly rates will range from $119 for a standard room during the summer to $359 for a deluxe room in the winter. There are also two, $2,000-a-night presidential suites available, in case you’re interested.

Cynics may question whether such an ambitious resort can succeed in sleepy St. Petersburg, but Guest said it’s a well-calculated gamble. He said Naples is also a sleepy town, but that hasn’t prevented the Ritz-Carlton from having the highest occupancy and room rates of any Florida resort. He sees the Vinoy as a "destination resort" that will compete with the Ritz-Carlton, the Breakers in Palm Beach and other five-star resorts.

“We’re in this for the long haul. If we don’t make a profit in the first four or five years we won’t go away. I personally think we can do it in two years, and three years would be fast.”

See also:

What’s in a name Aymer Vinoy Laughner: Built downtown palace ....(10/1990)

The story continues: See 'Vinoy verdict: exceptionally elegant' story ...(8/1992)

The Vinoy celebrates the 10-year anniversary of its grand reopening ..(8/2002)

Been 20 years since The Vinoy had its grand reopening, renaissance ...(7/2012)

Vinoy House was once Aymer Vinoy Laughner’s winter home ..............(5/2014)

The Vinoy Legacy: The $93 million restoration and (more history) ....(11/2014)

The Vinoy originally opened 90 years ago, a step back (retrospect) ......(7/2015)

The Vinoy will be getting a facelift: breaks ground on renovations .......(5/2016)

Vinoy Renaissance St. Petersburg Resort & Golf Club - new owner ....(7/2017)

Paul’s Landing at the Vinoy is the newest restaurant to open ................(3/2018)

The old Vinoy, the battle to save it and the power of legacy ...................(6/2018)

More stories and chronological timeline of Vinoy (more history 2) .......(9/2019)

St. Petersburg’s Vinoy hotel planning remodel for 2022 .........................(9/2021)

More pictures of The Vinoy

Go Back to The Vinoy history timeline