As the sun sets on the Surf, 93-year-old Florence Strong sits outside enjoying the play of light on the sharply angular surfaces of the kitschy mom and pop motel in Treasure Island, Fla., a beachfront barrier island community near St. Petersburg. Strong, a retired nurse, has been a seasonal visitor at the Surf ever since she and her late husband drove down from Auburn, N.Y., in the 1950s.
“I’ve come back every year since,” she says, shading her eyes from the sunlight that sparkles on the aqua surface of the swimming pool. “I truly hate to see them tear it down.”
With its kooky “77 Sunset Strip” design, the Surf is one of a dozen or so small family-owned motels built on Treasure Island in the 1940s and ’50s in the architectural space age style known as midcentury modern, or Googie, after a trendsetting Los Angeles coffee shop.
It is also the latest casualty in an ongoing, sometimes bitter turf war between commercial interests that want to replace the old, and in some cases deteriorating, midcentury modern motels with bigger, more modern structures, and a vocal and energetic group of preservation-minded residents who want to save them from the wrecking ball.
Scattered among the not quite so eye-catching strip malls and convenience stores that line this stretch of Gulf Boulevard, motels like the Sands, built in the same Googie style as the Surf; the Satellite, distinctive for its “sputnik” motifs; and the Thunderbird, with its signature neon sign greeting visitors as they drive off the causeway from the mainland, are, for the preservationists, a rich trove of architectural gems.
Rather than razing them, the pro-motel forces say, Treasure Island should polish them up and display them, much in the way spots like Miami’s South Beach; Palm Springs, Calif.; and Wildwood, N.J., have been revitalized by selling themselves as distinctive locations, worth visiting, at least in part for their architecture.
“Tourists will come here if there’s something unique for them to find here,” said Pete Gallagher, a local musician and radio host who is a vocal preservation advocate.
But developers say that renovating many of the hotels just isn’t possible. The Surf in particular is beyond repair, with its steel support columns badly corroded and its heating and cooling systems antiquated. Besides, Treasure Island’s mayor, Mary Maloof, points out, the Surf’s “new owners’ view is that they are not in the business of historic preservation.”
“It’s a real dilemma,” Maloof said. “We have one segment of our residents who feel these motels are historic landmarks that must be preserved at all costs and we have others who are equally determined and who see the small motels as old and decrepit and want them torn down.”
The mayor said that the last time the two sides squared off, in a contentious 2002 referendum battle over height restrictions on new beach construction, “the argument pitted neighbor against neighbor and friend against friend.” At the heart of the issues roiling Treasure Island are soaring property values, said Maloof, a St. Louis native who moved to Florida with her family in 1964, when beach properties went for as little as $30,000. Today, those same buildings sell for as much as $600,000 to developers who demolish the structures and in turn sell the bare lots for $1 million or more. “It’s easy to say these should be preserved,” Maloof said of the beach motels, “but it’s not so easy to ask the owners to forgo the kind of money they’re being offered to sell.”
“On the other hand,” she added, “they’re not making any more of these unique buildings that we have here. Once they’re gone, they’re gone for good.”
For the Surf’s guests, longtime employees and admirers, the fight is already lost. “May 1 is demo day,” said Kathy Szydloski, a desk clerk. “The last guest will check out April 26, and the bulldozers move in on the first.”
Rising in the razed 48-year-old motel’s place will be the Surf Beach Resort, a five-story, 30-unit hotel condominium whose neo-Mediterranean design, judging from a published rendering, is more generic than anything else. Units in the new Surf will be priced at about $400,000 each, with absentee owners able to rent them out at $175 a night, nearly triple the going rate at the present-day Surf.
“I’m not sure I’ll be back to Treasure Island,” said Strong, one of the many middle- and lower-income visitors from the Midwest and Northeast who flock there season after season. “I know there are other places here that are as affordable and that look as nice, but I’ve never been inside the others.”
Not all the people who favor development are newcomers. At John’s Pass on the northern tip of Treasure Island, 89-year-old Agnes Rice, matriarch of one of the community’s largest land-owning families, says, “I’m 89 years old, been here since 1945.”
Her son, C.C. Rice, vents about what he calls “that bunch of radicals down in Sunset Beach.”
He was referring to the group of preservationists who helped pass the 2002 referendum making it impossible for the city commission to waive the current five-story height limit on new developments without the approval of voters. As a result, the Rices abandoned plans to build an extensive high-rise development at the north end of Treasure Island.
“It’s unfortunate,” Rice said, still angry two years after the fact. “Now we can go wall to wall,” he added, meaning that instead of building up, developers will build from property line to property line in order to maximize space. “We would have preferred to put up buildings 12 to 15 stories high that would leave room in between so you could see the water. But we were outvoted.”
