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Henry Plant built the most expensive hotel in the Western Hemisphere in the middle of a Florida swamp. Nobody came. 🏛️
In 1891, railroad magnate Henry B. Plant opened the Tampa Bay Hotel at a cost of $3 million — roughly $100 million in today's dollars. It had 511 rooms, electric lights, and a private railroad spur. It also had 13 Moorish minarets and silver onion domes that made it look like it had been dropped from another continent entirely.
The hotel was a financial disaster almost from the start. Tampa had no real tourist infrastructure, no wealthy winter crowd, and no reason to justify a palace of that scale. Plant died in 1899. By 1905, the building was leased to the city for $1 a year.
It survived because no one could figure out what else to do with it. Today it houses the University of Tampa and a small museum. The minarets still rise above the Hillsborough River, exactly as Plant left them — a monument to one man's ego and the Florida boom mentality that has never really gone away.
What did they teach you about Henry Plant in school?
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