Sundries

From other blogs:

Gulfstream Park Opens, 1944 (Colin's Ghost) History of the horse racing track at Gulfstream Park

Frostproof (The South Florida Watershed Journal) The Floridian winter wonderland

Bites of the Alligator (The Keeper's Blog) A steamboat wreck on the St. Johns River

Ringling's Isles (Architecture Research) Development of St. Armand's Key

From newspapers:

"Busch Gardens to end 50-year flow of free beer" St. Petersburg Times, January 6, 2009

"Old Pinellas school could become teacher housing " St. Petersburg Times, November 12, 2008

"Couple buys 80-year-old penthouse of Babe Ruth" St. Petersburg Times, January 2, 2009

"Citrus grove grew with owner's passion " St. Petersburg Times, January 2, 2009

Images of Hialeah

Recent slideshow/video of Hialeah Park:

Stuff for a Rainy Day

While waiting for Tropical Storm Fay to pass on by...

"Hemingway Knocked Wallace Stevens into a Puddle and Bragged About It" from Littoral

"Hialeah Park and Joseph Widener, 1932" from Colin's Ghost

"Winters in Fort Myers weren't always a wonderland for Edison" from News-Press.com, August 17, 2008

"The Master of Coconut Grove" from Modernism magazine

"Painter in a Savage Land: The Strange Saga of the First European Artist in North America" a book excerpt from the Wall Street Journal, July17, 2008

The Florida Collection, from the Jacksonville Public Library

The Florida Collection is an online resource made available by the Jacksonville Public Library. It includes biographical sketches, historic photographs, and old postcards, among other things. Browsing through the postcard index, I discovered:

* a 1900s photograph of horses at the starting line at Moncrief Park

* two brave men plucking feathers from an ostrich, and

* a 1940s advertisement for Berney's Restaurant.

The Berney's card proclaims "Dine with the Man in Green from Ripley's 'Believe it or Not'." And sure enough, there's a man in a green suit. A little googling finds a January 18, 1937, letter to the editor, published in Time magazine: "Dressed completely in green day and night, he will give to any woman dressed entirely in green the choice of his menu, gratis. ... The only man in Florida to drive an automobile with a green licenses, he has even painted the 'White Horse' Scotch whisky statue green."

Read All About It

Florida news stories:

"Good grief! Owners say downtown comedy club haunted" (Ocala Star-Banner, March 6, 2008): "The ghost goes by the name of Linus...."

"A Saint, A Servant, and A Secret Pact" (Tampa Tribune, March 15, 2008): "The men would buy the food and cook an authentic Italian banquet for the spring fundraiser. They would tackle the whole shebang: pasta with an herb-infused tomato sauce, maybe throw in some anchovies and sardines; whole red snapper or grouper; chopped Swiss chard, pattied and fried; cardoon; fried cauliflower; homemade braided breads; and that crowd favorite, pignolata, fried pastries drizzled in a sweet honey mixture. Ladies from Tampa's tight-knit Italian-American community pitched in."

"In 'Gibtown,' Life Is A Carnival" (Tampa Tribune, March 3, 2008): "The 8-foot-4-inch Al Tomaini was volunteer fire chief. He ran Giant's Place restaurant beside the Alafia River. He was married to a legless woman, Jeanie the Half-Girl, who sold the business after he died. The restaurant closed last year."

"Two riders hope to preserve the heritage of Florida Cracker horses" (Gainesville Sun): "The two men and their Cracker horses Roady and Harvey's Dun Dealin - who are genetically linked to the Spanish horses brought to Florida by explorer Hernando DeSoto in 1539 - still have five more days of riding before making it to Tallahassee."

"NBC Puts Historic Miami Station Up For Sale" (cbs4.com, March 19, 2008): "WTVJ went on the air on Channel 4 59 years ago this week, March 21, 1949, as the first television station in Florida and only the 16th station in the nation. "

Old Horse Racing Photos

Borrowing an idea from Railbird, I looked through the Florida Photographic Archives for old racing photos. Some highlights:

• color postcard of Gulfstream's paddock before the renovations
• a 1939 Marion Post Wolcott photo of the Hialeah toteboard (love the bugler in the lower left corner)
• Really Rugged (sire of Rugged Lark) sold as a two-year-old for $32,000 at a 1962 auction at Hialeah ractrack
• 1932 photograph of the starting line at Hialeah, using a barrier rather than starting gates. The Totalisator in the background was the first used in the United States.
• 1960s/1970s (based on the boots) photograph of a woman bugler calling the horses to the post at a Miami racetrack

Florida Stories in the News

"Inventor Wants to Sap Storms" St. Petersburg Times 9/9/07

"Post Office Loves Being Stuck in Past" Orlando Sentinel 9/9/07

"Getting a Gauge on the Gators" News Press 9/14/07

"Bill Would Designate the Cracker Horse as the Official State Horse" WPTV.com 9/14/07

"Florida Panther Cub Comes to Lowry Park Zoo" St. Petersburg Times 9/14/07

"Voices of Lake Okeechobee" Florida Trend 9/1/07

"Hearing History's Echoes" Tampa Tribune 9/16/07

"Last Officer Class Leaving Pensacola; 7 Decade Tradition Ends" St. Petersburg Times 9/15/07

More Books

Some more books about Florida or related in some fashion to Florida:

The Black Stallion Challenged, by Walter Farley. A children's horse racing story, set at Hialeah Park.

Cassadaga: The South's Oldest Spiritualist Community, edited by John J. Guthrie Jr., Phillip Charles Lucas, and Gary Monroe. A look at the history, people, beliefs, and architecture of a east central Florida community.

Walt Disney Imagineering: A Behind the Dreams Look at Making the Magic Real, by The Imagineers. Does knowing how something was created take away from the experience, or increase the appreciation for what was accomplished?

American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn, by Ted Steinberg. Read a review of the book from the Christian Science Monitor.

Take the Train to Tampa Downs

I've noticed a lot of you find my blog when you search for history of race tracks in Florida. So for you, here's a little something I learned this weekend.

I was at the library, reeling through microfilm of old Tampa newspapers, reading about legal issues that shut down local horse and dog tracks in the 1920s (gambling, you know). And I noticed the ads the track ran on the bottom right hand corner of the sports page each day there was racing. These were attractive ads, with dynamic graphics of horses running and fashionable women, but what caught my eye were the directions for getting to get to the track. Tampa Downs (which became Sunshine Park, and now, Tampa Bay Downs) is not completely on the beaten path here, and I had wondered why people would venture so far out from the city to go to the races. But it seems that race fans could catch a special Seaboard train from Tampa'a Union Station to the track, or one of the Blue Line buses that ran every hour or two. It's small potatoes compared to the train from New York's Penn Station to Belmont Park, but on a Friday in 1927, 3,000 fans reportedly showed up to watch the ponies.

Another Florida Landmark on Endangered List: Hialeah Park

Hialeah Park has earned a dubious distinction -- it has been named to the National Trust of Historic Preservation's 2007 list of Eleven Most Endangered Historic Places. Hialeah Park is fourth on the list.

What can be done? For starters, the National Trust provides links to an online petition opposing demolition or inappropriate redevelopment of the racetrack and a form letter to send to City of Hialeah officials opposing the proposed development.

For more background on Hialeah Park's history, here's a link to my November 2006 blog entry, "The Sun is Setting on Hialeah's Race Track," which includes links to other resources.

The Horses of Proud Spirit by Melanie Sue Bowles

Today I'm reading The Horses of Proud Spirit, by Melanie Sue Bowles. Bowles's memoir is not about Florida per se, but is set in Florida and peopled by Floridians, good and bad. In this book, Bowles shows how she went from being unable to ride, to saving horses other people thought were hopeless. Each chapter is the story of a horse, and how that horse came to the Proud Spirit Horse Sanctuary near Myakka City (that's in Manatee County). Since writing this book, Melanie and Jim Bowles have moved the Proud Spirit Horse Sanctuary to Arkansas, where they continue to save horses, one at a time.

The book has been made into an Emmy-winning documentary by WEDU, Tampa's public television station.

Published by Florida's own Pineapple Press in 2003, The Horses of Proud Spirit is 200 pages, hardcover, with black and white photographs. If you buy the book through Bowles' website, part of the proceeds go to the horse sanctuary.

The Sun is Setting on Hialeah's Race Track

Hialeah Race Track was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979, and is eligible to be listed as a National Historic Landmark. However, the Hialeah city council just voted unanimously to permit the demolition of the historic stable buildings.

The track was a key element for attracting winter visitors to south Florida in the first half of the twentieth century. Tourists came to the tropics looking for glamour and excitement, and perhaps a touch of the illicit, all of which they found at the races.

The Miami Jockey Club opened in January 1925 on the edge of the Everglades. James Harrison Bright, a cattleman who had made money in with a laundry business in St. Louis, bought 17,000 acres in northwestern Dade County. His partner was Glenn Curtiss, the developer of Miami Springs and Opa-Locka, who ran also a flight school at the Curtiss-Bright Ranch. In 1907, Bright bought one square mile of frequently flooded land in what is now the Deer Park section of Hialeah. Everyone thought that he was crazy for wanting to live there, but he had heard that the area was to be drained.

To promote residential development, Bright donated land for school, churches, and municipal buildings. Rather than compete with the upper-class developments of Coral Gables and Miami Beach, Bright sought middle class homebuyers. Hialeah was incorporated in 1921, the same year Bright and Curtiss decided to build a horse track to attract more land buyers. Joseph Smoot agreed to build a track on Bright's land, and his investment paid off within 11 days of racing. The track's original landscaping was by James Donn, Sr., founder of Exotic Gardens florist and Gulfstream Park. Hurricanes in the late 1920s caused extensive damage in Hialeah, and it took some time for people to return even after things were rebuilt.

Despite the tremendous success of the Miami Jockey Club and despite the prevalence of betting at the track and other establishments, betting at horse racing was not legal in Florida until 1931. A 1927 Florida Supreme Court ban on betting suspended the Jockey Club's 1928 season, but in 1929, they had a new system called "buying option." To bet you bought a stock certificate (a postcard), and if the horse won you got a dividend. If the horse lost you were bankrupted.

Joseph E. Widener, a Philadelphia millionaire heir to a streetcar fortune, bought the Miami Jockey Club. The Widener family had been in horse racing since the 1890s. In 1931, the state legislature made it legal to bet on horse races, partly because it was a source of revenue for local governments struggling in the Great Depression. Widener hired Lester Giesler, architect, to rebuild the south Florida track, touring tracks across Europe and the United States to their best features into the Hialeah facility. Widener introduced turf racing from Europe and the Totalizer from Australia. The Totalizer was a mechanical way of calculating odds and payoffs and increased public confidence in the track's handling of bets. Widener, with the input of Bright, created Hialeah's famous infield lake with flamingos. The new Hialeah opened January 1932 after a $3 million rebuilding project.

Great horses, including Triple Crown winners Citation and Seattle Slew, raced here. A list of Hialeah stakes winners is a list of champion thoroughbreds. Although televised racing in the 1950s increased Hialeah's exposure and popularity, by the 1970s track management was threatening to close Hialeah and turn it into an industrial park. One of the track's major struggles during the late twentieth century was competition with Gulfstream Park and Calder Race Course for the best racing dates and the best horses. The last race at Hialeah was May 22, 2001, and the track has since lost its racing and betting permits.

Since the spring of 2001, the park has been largely unused, with just a skeleton crew, a flock of flamingos, and the occasional wedding. Maintenance of the large, old buildings has been minimal, and recent hurricanes have added to the burden. What will happen to this south Florida landmark and thoroughbred racing legend? One proposal is to make this the site of a new baseball stadium. Another proposal involves condominiums. Because of current state laws regulating parimutuel betting and racing calendars, it is very unlikely that horses will ever run here again.

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Source: John Crittenden, Hialeah Park: A Racing Legend. The Pickering Press, Miami, Florida, 1989.

The National Park Service's Historic American Building Collection includes 92 photographs of Hialeah race track.

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UPDATE 1: Dec. 3, 2006 Miami Herald article, "Hialeah Stables Lose Historic Designation" (link no longer working; not on Herald's website any more)
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UPDATE 2: Beth Dunlop's Architecture column in Miami Herald, Dec. 10, 2006 "High Stakes for Hialeah" (link no longer working; not on Herald's website any more)

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Save Hialeah Park!

Hialeah Park Bites the Dust Unless Citizens Unite (from blog Eye on Miami)

Crumbling Hialeah from Cindy Pierson Dulay's Horse-Races.net