The Coral Gables hotel with this history is the Biltmore, not a Baltimore Hotel. The names get swapped often. This is the Biltmore, at 1200 Anastasia Avenue. It is still a working resort.
George E. Merrick planned Coral Gables in the 1920s on land his father had left him, a City Beautiful town of Mediterranean houses, clubs, and a university. The hotel was the showpiece. Merrick and John McEntee Bowman of Bowman-Biltmore Hotels built it in about ten months for roughly $10 million. Schultze and Weaver designed it. It opened in January 1926. The tower copies the Giralda, the bell tower of Seville Cathedral. At 315 feet it was the tallest building in Florida until the Dade County Courthouse passed it in 1928. The pool was billed as the largest in the world. Galas, fashion shows, golf, and water shows filled the first years. Babe Ruth played the course.
The boom did not last. A hurricane, the land crash, and bankruptcy took the hotel off the social calendar. In 1929 Thomas “Fatty” Walsh, a New York gambler, was shot and killed at a party on the thirteenth floor, which local accounts describe as a Prohibition card room. The man named as the shooter left in the crowd and was not caught. That killing is documented. What people attach to it is not.
The building’s later life is the other documented half. During the Second World War it was an Army hospital. It later served as a Veterans Administration hospital. In 1952 the University of Miami used it as an early campus. The hospital closed in 1968. The hotel stood empty for years. Neighborhood kids slipped in. A renovation of about $55 million reopened it in 1987.
The ghost list is guest and staff lore. Walsh is the name on the thirteenth floor: a presence in the suite, sometimes cigar smoke. Other reports add a woman in white, elevators that move with no call, party noise, voices, and writing on mirrors. A midnight security guard, George Warren, said alarms tripped in empty halls and that a monitor showed wheelchair tracks in the old country-club wing that were gone when he walked down. None of that has been verified. The hospital years are the obvious source for the wheelchair story. The murder is the obvious source for the thirteenth-floor story. The building does not confirm either one.
The pool front and the Giralda-style tower. The thirteenth floor is the one tied to the 1929 shooting. The ghost claims stay claims.
Relevant links
- WLRN: a history of the Biltmore — Merrick, the 1929 shooting, the hospital years, the empty decades
- Beyond Haunted: Biltmore Hotel — opening date, architects, tower, and the Walsh account kept separate from the sightings
- The Dead History: Biltmore — the 1987 reopening and the security-guard notes
- George E. Merrick, Wikipedia — the planned city the hotel was built to anchor