Mark Lane: After long decline, DeLand's landmark hotel falls

Excavator equipment was clawing away at the historic Hotel Putnam on Valentine's Day morning, systematically erasing a building that had been a DeLand landmark since 1923. They fed a growing hill of twisted steel beams on the partially cleared lot while the spray from a water cannon kept dust levels at bay.

By lunchtime, the place was gone. A sad day.

There had been hotels on this site since 1885. That's when the Grove House opened, so called because it was nestled in the middle of an orange grove, which must have made it a sweetly picturesque spot to visit. After Arthur Putnam bought the hotel, he renamed it the Putnam Inn.

When the Putnam Inn burned down on Nov. 4, 1921, the headlines were already describing the hotel as "historic." "Historic Putnam Inn Destroyed by Fire," as the top of the DeLand Daily News announced that day. "Historic Putnam Inn of DeLand is in ruins at the county capital and Volusia County is united in deep regret over the misfortune," The Daytona Morning Journal eulogized.

The blaze started in the hotel's furnace room and spread so fast that breakfasting guests in the dining room didn't have time to dash upstairs to grab their bags. About 100 people were staying there at the time, including the football team from Oglethorpe University but none were hurt. Damage was estimated at $70,000, about $1.2 million in today's dollars.

More:Demolition begins on historic Hotel Putnam in downtown DeLand

It says something about DeLand's prospects in the early 1920s that plans for a new, more imposing, and most importantly, fire-resistant hotel were made as soon as the ashes cooled.

The new six-story, 128-room, concrete hotel stood complete at the end of 1923. Despite the crash in the Florida real estate market and banking crisis of the mid-1920s and the Great Depression that followed, the hotel kept rolling and quickly became a social center. A place that was the backdrop to dances, proms, concerts, weddings, club meetings, dinners and business and political huddles.

The Red Sox's farm team, the Louisville Colonels, used the hotel as its headquarters for six years in the 1950s.

DeLand has a better history than most places for preserving its older buildings — its red-brick downtown, the Athens theater, the Historic Volusia County Courthouse — but the Putnam Hotel was passed from owner to owner, each pitching new but unworkable plans for its rehabilitation and did not fare as well.

In 1965, owners tried to sell the building to the Volusia County School District and got a hard no on what looked like a white elephant. The hotel rented out cheap efficiency apartments until everyone was booted out in 2011.

I recall wandering around the place in the 1980s when I'd sometimes have a beer in its dimly lit American Room. The American Room was kind of a dive bar but previously the more upscale Cypress Room so called for its pecky cypress paneling. Cute and rustic. "DeLand's most modern cocktail lounge," as its 1940s News-Journal ads boasted. Back when aviators from the DeLand Naval Air Station used to land there.

Even in its rundown state, the bar still boasted a 22-foot cypress dugout canoe hanging from its low ceiling. It had been there since the 1940s. (The Seminole artifact is now on more dignified display at Stetson University.)

All those years ago, the place already had the feel of a down-on-its-luck remnant of a happier past. Like the deteriorating and dusty display of long-dead stuffed birds down the hall from the bar. Like the canoe, the birds had been part of the Florida Exhibit at the 1933-1934 Chicago World's Fair, the Century of Progress International Exposition. The place was full of artifacts.

It's easy to imagine a happier fate for the hotel, if not for the birds. If different decisions had been made decades ago and different owners had made different plans under different economic conditions. Before the place had gone so far downhill. Restaurants and shops on the first floor, apartment suites upstairs. A commercial and social center with craft cocktails once more served up at the rustic and cozy wood-paneled Cypress Room that by its very retro atmosphere was again DeLand's most modern cocktail lounge.

Yeah, a typical preservationist's dream. Cool but impractical. Instead, for decades, the address could routinely be found recited in the police briefs in The News-Journal and DeLand Sun News’ inner pages.

From landmark to nuisance property to vacant lot. The sad devolution of so many historic properties in city centers. Nothing left there now but piles of steel and bricks to clean up and memories to talk about.

Mark Lane is a News-Journal columnist. His email is mlanewrites@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Hotel Putnam in DeLand demolished after long decline - Mark Lane