Before Sunday book talk, Kristen Hare explores the resiliency of Tampa Bay’s beloved historic hotels

For her new book about Florida, Kristen Hare spent two years entrenched not just in state and newspaper archives, but rummaging through brochures, piles of postcards, plus pictures old and new. She listened to the stories of families who ran, and in some cases still operate, the most beloved places to stay in the state we call home. Then she managed to squeeze more than a-century-and-a-half of stories into less than 200 pages.

“Hotels, Motels & Inns of Florida: Historic and Beloved Places to Stay in the Sunshine State” brings buildings to life. It’s a bonafide guidebook for anyone who wants to relive history for the price of an overnight stay—and a must-have for Floridaphiles who crave knowledge of the unique buildings and homegrown businesses that are getting harder and harder to find around here.

After its Sept. 1 release on Reedy Press (which has published three editions of Hare’s “100 Things to Do in Tampa Bay Before You Die” book) the Tampa Bay Times obituary writer started on a book launch tour that’s already visited Tombolo Books, Oxford Exchange, The Vinoy, and Tampa Bay History Center. On Thursday, the journey brings Hare to Safety Harbor before culminating in a special talk this Sunday in downtown Tampa.

In full disclosure, this writer is part of the conversation because he doesn’t like to pass up a chance to talk face-to-face with one of the Bay area’s most celebrated journalists. We are supposed to discuss old Florida hotels, nostalgia and lore, but launching a book alongside the arrival of back-to-back once-in-a-century storms has been an eye-opening experience for Hare, who is also Faculty and Director of Craft and Local News at the Poynter Institute. Not just because of the sleepless nights and horrifying images of destruction around the Bay area, but because of what it’s been like to check in on some of the nearly 80 hotels, motels and inns in the collection.

“That’s led me to think a lot about not just resilience, but the determination that it takes to live here—that we don’t often need, but that exists,” Hare told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay. “Many of these places are perfect examples of what that looks like in physical form.”

Some of the hotels in Hare’s book, like the Island Hotel in Cedar Key, have survived multiple hurricanes. Inside its limestone and oyster shell walls is a mural of Neptune with a pair of topless mermaids. Hare said that a close look reveals stains from the ‘50s when a storm took the roof off the former general store.

“Storms left a mark on that mural the way that they leave a mark on all of Florida, and now, after the last two weeks, all of us,” she added. “But it’s still there, and it’s still this incredible place to go.”

Closer to home on Pinellas’ barrier islands, the resilience is a little more obvious. Like on Treasure Island five miles away, Helene turned roadways into canyons of sand outside St. Pete Beach’s Bon-Aire Resort. Milton’s winds blew the big letter B right off the hotel’s iconic neon. While guests from across generations have wished the hotel well and offered to help, Bon-Aire’s social media account found light in the situation with a caption that says, “We will B back to normal in no time!”

“I just want to take a page from their book and follow their example,” Hare said of the hotel’s ability to dust itself off and keep going with grace. “It feels, to me, like something that is part of Florida. Like, ‘Fuck it, let’s, let’s do it again.’ Just that resilience.”

And just down the street from Hotel Flor where Hare appears on Sunday is Tampa’s everlasting symbol of resilience: The Jackson House.

The road towards “Hotels, Motels & Inns of Florida” started in 2019 when Hare wrote an obituary for Willie Robinson Jr. who spent his life trying to save the home he was born in. The house, which currently sits seemingly on the edge of destruction in what used to be The Scrub, housed the likes of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Ella Fitzgerald, and Ray Charles who could not stay at whites-only hotels during their travels on the Chitlin’ Circuit.

The back-and-forth fight to restore the landmark, at times, seems nowhere near resolution. But like the nearby former Bing Rooming House in Plant City (now a museum), Tallahassee’s Tookes Hotel (set to become an Airbnb this summer), and Tampa’s Rogers Hotel (burned down in 1974), Jackson House tells the story of folks whose entrepreneurship not only felt like resistance, but the beginning of the Black middle class.

“They were places that had to be created out of necessity so that people could be safe,” Hare said, adding that many of the nearly one-dozen historic Black hotels in her book fell victim to highway expansion and redlining. “But for this brief amount of time, they were like islands in a really hostile world.”

Resilient because of the community around them, many of the hotels detailed in Hare’s book offer a bit of a boost to not just to our region, but others like places in North Carolina that are also in the throes of recovery.

“It’s this sense of doing what you have to, when you have to,” Hare explained. “People step up and come out, and we get to see who we really are.”

There’s no cover to see Kristen Hare and Ray Roa talk resiliency and “Hotels, Motels & Inns of Florida: Historic and Beloved Places to Stay in the Sunshine State”  at Tampa’s Hotel Flor on Sunday, Oct. 20.
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This article appears in Oct 10-16, 2024.