St. Petersburg: Renaissance Vinoy (May 2002)

My spouse and I stayed at the Renaissance Vinoy Resort and Golf Club (also known as the Vinoy Park Hotel) for three nights in late May 2002 along with another couple. The hotel is located near the Salvador Dalí Museum, the Morean Arts Center, Tropicana Field, and a variety of pristine Florida beaches. The hotel also offers easy access to Tampa International Airport (TPA), St. Petersburg-Clearwater International Airport (PIE), and a variety of shopping and restaurants. Guest rooms at our hotel in St. Petersburg, Florida feature stylish decor, expansive marble bathrooms, plush bedding and LCD TVs. Our Renaissance is also home to five celebrated restaurants, a full-service spa, beautiful 18-hole golf course, ultramodern fitness center, shimmering outdoor pool and event space.

The hotel is an historic Mediterranean Revival style hotel on Tampa Bay on the bay front area of downtown and overlooks the Vinoy Yacht Basin. On September 11, 1978, it was added to the U.S. National Register of Historic Places. On April 18, 2012, the AIA's Florida Chapter placed it on its list of Florida Architecture: 100 Years. 100 Places. The Vinoy was built in 1925 by Aymer Vinoy Laughner. Construction began on February 5 and took 10 months to complete. The hotel was a seasonal hotel open from around December to March. Rates were $20.00 a night, the highest in the area at that time. Celebrities ranging from Babe Ruth, Herbert Hoover, Calvin Coolidge and James Stewart are known to have stayed there. During World War II the hotel was taken over by the U.S. Army and used for a training school. After the war, the hotel was sold to Charles Alberding for $700,000. The hotel continued to prosper for the next couple of decades but fell out of favor and into decline and disrepair by the end of the 1960s. In 1974 the Vinoy closed its doors and most of its contents were sold at auction. The hotel sat vacant until the early 1990s when it was bought by a partnership between Renaissance Hotels and Resorts and the Vinoy Development Corporation. A $93-million renovation was undertaken, and in two years the Vinoy was reopened. In 2005, the Vinoy earned AAA Four-Diamond status. Over the years, there have been reports of ghost sitings and other supernatural events at the hotel. Some of the reports were by visiting major league baseball players and staff, who stayed at the Vinoy when in town to play the Tampa Bay Rays. One of the reports came from a strength coordinator for the Pittsburgh Pirates. He described seeing a translucent apparition of a man near a desk in his room. Others have noted seeing a man dressed in formal attire walking the halls only to disappear without a trace. (Fortunately, we didn’t see any such things while we stayed there!)