Floridan Hotel

About this property

The Hotel Flor Tampa Downtown, Tapestry Collection by Hilton, is a historic hotel in Tampa, Florida, opened in 1927 as the Hotel Floridan. It is located at 905 North Florida Avenue in the north end of the downtown core. On March 12, 1996, the Floridan was added to the U.S. National Register of Historic Places. Construction of the Hotel Floridan began in 1926. It was designed by prominent Tampa architects G.A. Miller and Francis J. Kennard and was constructed at a cost of $1.9 million. It opened in 1927, with 19 floors and 316 rooms. At the time the Floridan was the tallest building in Tampa and would remain the tallest building in until 1966 when the Franklin Exchange Building was completed. The hotel's bar, the Sapphire Room, was a popular nightspot during World War II for servicemen who were training at nearby Drew Field to fly B-17s over Europe. Many of the service men at that time were housed in makeshift barracks located underneath the bleachers at the old Florida State Fairgrounds racetrack a few blocks away. The bar's wild reputation at the time earned it the nickname "The Surefire Room". The hotel began to decline in the early 1960s, as more modern "motels" were built along the highways that skirted the city. In 1966, the hotel closed to overnight guests and remained open to long term renters only. By the 1980s, the hotel had become a residence for transients, renting rooms by the week or month. The Floridan Hotel finally closed its doors in 1989, after new owners failed to bring the building up to new firecodes. After a fire in 1987, the building changed owners and remained largely vacant for years. In 1989, businessman Akio Ogawa and Sity International Inc. acquired the property at a foreclosure auction; the hotel closed that year after the new owners did not bring the building into compliance with updated fire-code requirements. The property was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on March 12, 1996. Ogawa and Sity International later sold the building to Capital LLC in 1997. In 2005, the property was purchased for US$6 million by hotelier and real-estate investor Antonios "Tony" Markopoulos, who began a multi-year restoration of the hotel’s exterior and public interiors. The original rooftop “Floridan” sign was discovered in a rooftop storage space in 2005 and was returned to the roof in 2008 after restoration. Ahead of reopening, many smaller rooms were combined and reconfigured; the reopened hotel contained 213 guest rooms, including 15 junior suites and three penthouse suites, compared with more than 400 rooms in earlier periods. The renovation restored a number of original lobby features, including the front desk, staircases, and railings. The hotel reopened on July 30, 2012 as the Floridan Palace Hotel, following a grand-opening event on July 28, 2012.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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