1674-1 Tony Goldman DATE: Thursday, December 3, 1987 EDITION: FINAL
SECTION: NEIGHBORS MB PAGE: 4 LENGTH: 55 lines
ILLUSTRATION: photo: Tony GOLDMAN
SOURCE/CREDIT LINE: STEPHEN SMITH Herald Staff Writer
GOLDMAN DELAYS HOTEL'S OPENING
The way Tony Goldman figures, better to open later and stronger than
sooner and weaker.
That's why his Park Central Hotel, rising in blue and white splendor on
Ocean Drive, won't open as a renovated, top-of-the- line inn until early next
year.
Want proof? Check the mattresses standing tall in the lobby, beyond the
bloated fish etched on glass. These are good mattresses, new and fresh, unlike
the kind so frequently flung on South Beach sidewalks.
Said Goldman, who can go metaphor-to-metaphor with the best of them:
"When you're playing a big symphony, if you really want it to be right you've
got to make sure all the parts are right."
His symphony stretches along Ocean Drive, across Washington Avenue. It is
hotel buildings standing high and storefronts slung low.
The first concerto was a melange of pounding and sawing, making over the
80 rooms in the Park Central, the 45 in the Imperial and assorted other South
Beach properties.
Goldman plans to open the Park Central, 640 Ocean Dr. , by mid-January.
The plans weren't always such. He once hoped to have the hotel up and running
by November.
He bought the Park Central and Imperial on June 1, 1986. The next
year-and-a-half was spent getting acquainted -- and pumping as much as $1
million into the properties.
"I would think if I was looking at that market, I would want to make sure
every duck was in a row, " said M. Chase Burritt, senior principal at the Coral
Gables office of Laventhol & Horwath, an accounting firm specializing in the
resort industry.
Once the Park Central's rooms take in their first guests, Goldman will
open Lucky's, a restaurant boasting regional American cuisine. It could open
by Feb. 1, Goldman said.
Already, the Heathcote, a compact building just down Ocean Drive from the
Park Central, has opened. This incarnation, as an apartment building, is
temporary. Goldman eventually will convert the Heathcote to short-term suites.
The Imperial should open as a hotel six to nine months after the Park
Central's January debut, Goldman said. Later, a nightclub -- one that is
soundproofed -- will start jumping downstairs at the Imperial.
Goldman isn't all hotels. He owns the powder blue building at the
southeast corner of Washington Avenue and Fifth Street.
There, more traditional storefront businesses will sit concrete block to
concrete block with hip artists. The first stores could open by the end of the
month.
Back on Ocean Drive, in nameless buildings north of the Park Central,
there are plans for ice cream parlors and candy shops.
It will happen, Goldman vows. Just be patient.
"It takes the pioneers years of hanging in there," he said. "And we're
human beings. We're not banks, we're not insurance companies."
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