The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
It doesn't matter how far you travel, how long you travel, there's always a surprise at the end of the road, at the end of the day. There are great hotels in the world. The Ritz in Paris. The Plaza in New York. Claridge's in London. The wonderful pile of stone at the top of the Spanish Steps in Rome, the Hassler. What a surprise, therefore, to discover the most beautiful hotel in the world in tacky Florida, The Breakers in Palm Beach. It looks like Europe transported to America, as well it should, since 75 artisans from Italy were brought over to do the magnificent paintings on the high ceilings of the lobby and the public rooms. The joint looks like something out of the Vatican. Henry Morrison Flagler, who had made his fortune as a long partner of John D. Rockefeller in the Standard Oil Company (now our Esso), arrived in Florida in 1878 and started building railroads down the state's east coast. He built, in 1894, the world's largest hotel Ñ the Royal Poinciana with 1,100 rooms that could host 1,750 guests. With hallways Ñ stretching three miles in length Ñ that required bellboys to deliver messages from the front desk to guest rooms on bicycles. With America's richest families flocking there, Flagler decided to build a second hotel on the beachfront next door. He called it the Palm Beach Inn. But when so many guests requested rooms "down by the breakers" Ñ where the surf rolled in Ñ in 1901 he labelled it The Breakers. After one fire, the new Breakers, constructed entirely of wood, reopened with rooms starting at $4.00 a night, including three meals a day. We can all dream. This was 1904. The guest register: Vanderbilts, Astors, Roosevelts, Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, William Randolph Hearst and random European nobility. In 1925, 12 years after the death of the visionary Flagler, fire again hit the all-wood mansion, which burned so quickly the clouds of dark smoke could be seen 20 miles away. Flagler's masterpiece was gone, but not for long. His admirers vowed to bless his memory with the best resort hotel in the world, and be open for the 1926-27 winter season. The architects selected were those who later designed the finest hotels in New York Ñ Pierre (now run by Toronto's Isy Sharpe), the Waldorf-Astoria and the Sherry Netherlands. More than 1,200 construction workers worked around the clock to meet the opening date Ñ hence the 75 Italians. They did. What is most dazzling is that the whole building Ñ outside and inside Ñ is patterned after the architectural masterpieces from Italy. The fountain out front is from the Boboli Gardens in Florence. The Mediterranean Courtyard Ñ the inner gardens of the Villa Sante in Rome. The Gold Room ceiling Ñ Galleria Accademia of the Grand Palace in Venice. And on and on. The eyes boggle while the stomach groans. The main lobby is 200-feet long, decorated with ceiling paintings. The Florentine Dining Room has a beamed ceiling modeled after a circa 1400 one in Florence. Know what is the modern definition of a "miracle"? It's to go to a restaurant where they're not playing "Happy Birthday". In the vast-domed Circle Dining Room, where scenes of Italian cities and Monte Carlo are highlighted by a huge Venetian chandelier of bronze, mirrors and crystals suspended from a skylight in the centre of the room, white sailboats are skimming across the water out the window and "Happy Birthday" is being played by a large man with a golden harp. Now, that's class. Only one problem. No enforced dress code. (Endemic to the world.) If you're going to display a hotel, that looks even better than the best European hotels, we don't want to eat beside someone in shorts and flip-flops and even worse violations of the states of humanity. Send them home, tell them to dress up to the standard of such a place with great staff, great food, and a young blonde who just walks around the dining room with a never-ending bottle of champagne and says, "It's on the house"
