Drive west across the Pinellas Bayway and you can’t miss it. Eight stories of bubblegum pink with white trim, towers and arched openings and red tile, sitting on white sand between Gulf Boulevard and the water. It looks like a building somebody invented for a novel.
It looks that way because a man built it out of a story he couldn’t finish any other way.
Why was the Don CeSar built?
Thomas Rowe was a young Londoner traveling in Spain when he met a woman named Lucinda.
As locals tell the story, they fell in love in front of a pink hotel on the water and planned to marry and honeymoon there. Her family refused the match and forbade her to see him. He never saw her again.
He came to America, made money in real estate, and in 1924, at forty-two, bought eighty acres of sand on what is now St. Pete Beach.
He hired the Indianapolis architect Henry Dupont. They blended Mediterranean and Moorish styles the way the fashionable hotels in Palm Beach and Coral Gables were doing, and built the pink hotel from the memory. He named it the Don CeSar after Don Cesar de Bazan, the hero of William Vincent Wallace’s opera Maritana.
It opened in January 1928, three hundred percent over budget. By mid-1927 he’d run short of money and a Pass-a-Grille industrialist named Warren Webster lent him enough to furnish the place. A room went for twenty-four dollars a night and dinner cost two-fifty.
Whether every detail of the Lucinda story survives scrutiny is a fair question, and I’m not the person to settle it. What nobody disputes is that a man spent a fortune and most of a decade building a large pink object on an empty beach. The reason he gave was a woman he met once.
Did F. Scott Fitzgerald stay at the Don CeSar?
He did. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald spent a week at the hotel in 1930, and the hotel has leaned on the Fitzgerald association ever since. Clarence Darrow was a guest. So was Lou Gehrig, and Franklin Roosevelt, and by persistent local rumor Al Capone, who had business interests in St. Petersburg and appreciated a place with distance around it. The Yankees signed a three-year spring training deal in 1931 that helped carry the hotel through the Depression. That’s the least romantic and most useful fact in its history.
The date changes the Fitzgerald visit. 1930 is the year Zelda had her first breakdown, in Europe. The Great Gatsby was five years behind him and Tender Is the Night four years ahead, in the stretch where the work was hard and the money was going and the decade that had made him was over. Whatever a week in a pink hotel on a Florida beach was for the Fitzgeralds in 1930, it wasn’t the Jazz Age.
What happened to the hotel after Rowe died?
He died of a heart attack in 1940 with his intentions for the hotel unresolved, and it went to his estranged wife Mary, who had rarely visited it. In 1942 the Army bought the building and turned it into a sub-base hospital, then a convalescent center for airmen coming back from the war. The pink palace spent the forties full of injured young men.
After the war it held federal offices until the last of them left in 1969, and then it sat empty and deteriorating with demolition a real possibility. Local residents organized and saved it. It reopened as a resort in 1973 and joined the National Tone of Historic Places the following year. Since then it’s been in films and a Tom Petty documentary shot on the roof, taken hurricane damage in 2024, closed for months, and reopened. It’s coming up on a hundred years old.
The season, and what it says about persistence
The hotel ran a season of about four months, mid-December to mid-April, and closed for the rest of the year. Rowe built an enormous permanent structure to be occupied a third of the time, on a barrier island reachable only with effort, and he did it as the twenties were about to end badly.
Then the Depression arrived eighteen months after the doors opened. The hotel should have failed and didn’t, kept alive by a baseball contract and by Rowe himself, who was in the building constantly, dapper and asthmatic, attending to every detail, estranged from a wife who stayed downtown.
People who talk about writing a book often imagine the hard part is the beginning.
The hard part is the stretch after the excitement burns off, when the thing is half built and expensive and the outside world has stopped being encouraging. Rowe spent a decade in that stretch. Most finished books come out of that stretch too.
What can a writer learn from the Don CeSar?
Three things, and I’ve had years of looking at that building to think about them.
The first is that where a project came from has almost nothing to do with what it’s good for.
Rowe built a monument to a private heartbreak, and what he produced housed wounded soldiers, saved a beach economy, and gave a town its landmark for a century. Nobody staying there this weekend is thinking about Lucinda. Books work the same way. People start them for reasons that are personal and sometimes embarrassing, and the finished thing serves readers who neither know nor need the reason.
The second is that going over budget is normal and rarely the disaster it feels like at the time. Three hundred percent over, out of money before the furniture, saved by a loan from a man down the beach.
It opened anyway, and the overrun is a trivia item now. Every book I’ve worked on has run longer than planned. The manuscripts that fail are the ones that stopped.
The third is about what outlives the intention.
Rowe died without settling what should happen to the place, and it went to a wife he was estranged from, then to the Army, then nearly to a wrecking ball. The building survived because strangers organized to save it. That was luck. If you want your work to land somewhere specific after you, write it down, a point I make at more length about Kerouac’s estate. That was worth ninety-one dollars and took decades to sort out.
Writing there, and looking at it
You don’t have to book a room to use the place. The beach is public, the building is visible for miles, and sitting on the sand within sight of it as the light goes is one of the better free things in this county.
For typing I wouldn’t choose it. Resort lobbies are loud, the beach is bright enough to make a screen useless, and sand and laptops have a bad relationship. What it’s good for is the other job: the long think, the walk where you decide what the book is. I’ve said the same about Philippe Park and the Safety Harbor waterfront. Places with a big view are for deciding. Places with a table are for typing.
Go late in the afternoon. The building faces west and the light on that pink at sunset is the reason every photographer in Pinellas County has the same shot in their archive, mine included.
The story that built the building
Every so often somebody tells me their story is too small to be a book. Usually they’re a person who built a business, or raised a family through something hard, or spent forty years getting good at a thing nobody writes about.
Then there’s a hotel on St. Pete Beach that exists because a man couldn’t marry a woman in Spain. The story was one sentence long. What he built out of it took eighty acres, four years, and every dollar he had, and it’s been standing for nearly a century.
Size doesn’t matter. The difference is whether somebody does the work of turning it into something other people can walk into. A ghostwriter in St. Petersburg does that with a life that’s been sitting in one sentence for years. The rest of this cluster is in the Writing in Tampa Bay hub, and the Discovery Intensive is where we find out how big your one sentence turns out to be.
