Saturday, November 14, 1998Story last updated at 8:21 p.m. on Thursday, November 12, 1998
'Twas a grand time for a grand hotel
Hotel plans loom over downtown this season of a muted Armistice Day.
The Adam's Mark will be the biggest hotel for miles around, bulking 17 stories from the erstwhile City Hall riverfront, bigger than a breadbox, although resembling one.
Taxpayers are pitching in $23 million in loose change to help out the folks who are building the Adam's Mark, so glad are city officials to see it.
One would think it is the reincarnation of the George Washington.
It's not.
The George Washington loomed, too, on an Armistice Day, but it was one that was far from muted.
Hundreds of marchers paraded through downtown Jacksonville on Nov. 11, 1925. Guns and drums and banners and bands and patriotic speakers and a ball and great huzzahs and cheering marked the end of the Great War eight years before.
It was a grand time to announce a new hotel for downtown Jacksonville.
Not for years would Nov. 11 be a national holiday - in Florida it was proclaimed Liberty Day - but the date of the World War armistice had been deemed for several years a time to mark, revere and observe.
Robert Kloeppel announced the day before the big parade he would build a 15-story hotel at Julia and Adams streets. The news broke in the morning paper.
Kloeppel asked the taxpayers not for a single dime, but then he never had, and I am not sure he ever did.
Kloeppel had arrived in Jacksonville 20 years before, a young and penniless German immigrant with a work ethic and a good set of hands. He became a mechanic, a pioneer of flight, a real estate man and a hotelier.
By 1925 Kloeppel owned the Flagler Hotel, down by the railroad station, and property along Park Street, ''the rapidly developing business artery in Riverside that extends off the Lee Street viaduct connecting Riverside with the business district at the Jacksonville Terminal.''
He had become one of the city's largest tax-PAYERS when he announced he would build what the newspapers said would be ''the largest and most magnificent hotel'' in Jacksonville.
The cost would be $1.5 million, back when that was real money. The hotel would have 350 rooms, each with bath, hot and cold water, ice water for drinking and an electric fan.
The hotel site on the northwest corner of Adams and Julia streets was occupied by three two-story dwellings. On Dec. 15, 1926, the hotel changed the face of Jacksonville forever.
''Society turned out in force, and high officials of the state and city, and many visitors from all sections of the country attended to make the event one of the outstanding affairs of the social season,'' The Florida Times-Union said.
''The mammoth sign 'George Washington' blazed forth on the Jacksonville horizon last night with an added significance, and on Adams Street, automobiles roared up to the entrance to discharge loads of beautifully gowned women and formally attired men to lend a true metropolitan atmosphere to the scene.''
Mayor John Alsop was there, of course, and Gov. John W. Martin, and former Gov. Cary Hardee, and municipal radio station WJAX broadcast the grand occasion. (Each room in the new hotel had a radio loudspeaker and headphones.)
For the next 44 years the GW, as it became commonly known, was the true hub of the city.
Here came the conventions and the big meetings and the very important and the glamorous and the sacred and the profane. The Steak House and the auditorium and the cocktail lounge and the Rainbow Room and the coffee shop and the drugstore became the places to meet, whether for a drink, a seven-course meal, ham and eggs or a grilled cheese and shake.
Lindbergh stayed at the GW, and the Beatles, and me. Big bands played there and the School Boy Patrol danced there.
The GW Auditorium, added in 1941, was the only place in the city big enough for concerts and balls and boat shows, other than the Duval County Armory, which was a tad short of ambience.
Jacksonville revolved around downtown and the GW through the 1960s. By the 1970s, the gloss was gone.
The dynamic that doomed downtown claimed the GW as well. Kloeppel sold to dog track magnate Bill Johnston in 1963 and Johnston sold it six years later to people nobody remembers and it folded.
Brick-by-brick from the top down, the GW was torn down in 1973. We won't see its like again, $23 million from the public sock drawer notwithstanding.
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