1675-2 New Hotels mh94 BEACH HOTEL PLAN HAILED AS MAJOR BOOST FOR BLACKS 08/01/1994
THE MIAMI HERALD
Copyright (c) 1994, The Miami Herald
DATE: Monday, August 1, 1994 EDITION: FINAL
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: 1B LENGTH: 56 lines
ILLUSTRATION: photo: H. T. SMITH, Peter CALIN with Marvin Holloway
and Eugene Ford, Plan of the HOTEL (Large)
SOURCE/CREDIT LINE: PETER WHORISKEY Herald Staff Writer
MEMO: see end of text for cutlines
BEACH HOTEL PLAN HAILED AS MAJOR BOOST FOR BLACKS
The building is as much a monument as a hotel. The Sheraton Suites
project, now being planned for South Beach, represents the most tangible
memory of Dade's grueling black tourism boycott.
The hotel will be developed and owned by a corporation led by four black
businessmen, four friends who responded to an offer of up to $10 million in
city incentives. The money fulfills a promise to African Americans that led to
the boycott settlement last year.
"This project is right out of the vision that we who led the boycott had
back in 1990, " said H.T. Smith, one of the movement's leaders. "It has the
potential to bring the Greater Miami area from worst to first as a tourist
destination for people of African-American descent."
The 265-room project, according to Smith and others, would be the only
major U.S. hotel owned primarily by African Americans. Its closest competitor
in that regard is a hotel at Howard University that has less than 100 rooms.
"This will put Miami on the map in a way that no other city in America
is, " Smith said.
The city and the developers, HCF Group, Inc. , led by Jerry Bailey, Peter
Calin, Marvin Holloway and Eugene Ford, are negotiating the nature and terms
of the city investment.
Miami Beach City Manager Roger Carlton said the city would recover its
money in many ways: in direct payments, in increased tax revenues and
intangibles like job creation and the promotion of social causes.
The promise of investment in an African-American hotel in Miami Beach
represented a key concession in the settlement of the three-year boycott.
Miami Beach Mayor Seymour Gelber led settlement efforts by offering a
medallion to Nelson Mandela. The hotel inducement represents the tangible
backup to that gesture.
The total value of the project, including land, is about $37 million. It
proposes the preservation of the Royal Palm and Shorecrest hotels, and the
construction of a 16-story tower behind the Shorecrest. The project would
preserve the lobbies and reconfigure the old rooms into suites. The Shorecrest
would have 18, the Royal Palm 54 and the tower 193.
The project fits into the most recent wave of South Beach
regeneration. Four derelict hotels -- the St. Moritz, the Royal Palm, the
Shorecrest and the Bancroft -- now constitute a beachside blight on the 1500
block of Collins Avenue. But two other recent proposals call for the
restoration of the St. Moritz and the Bancroft. The Sheraton project would
complete the row.
"The facade of the tower is meant to relate to the two historic
buildings, " said architect Kobi Karp, of the design by VOA Associates and Lane
Pettigrew Wood Karp. "The area is coming back all at once."