Back in January 1926 the Biltmore Hotel you face opened as one of the great resort hotels of the twentieth century, and it has survived bankruptcy, wartime conversion, and abandonment to stand today as a national historic landmark in full operation. It opened in January 1926 as the crown jewel of George Merrick's planned city, designed by Schultze and Weaver — the same firm that designed the Waldorf Astoria in New York — in a Spanish Renaissance style with a tower modeled on the Giralda in Seville. For a few brilliant years it was everything Merrick promised: Al Capone gambled in a suite on the thirteenth floor; Johnny Weissmuller, the Olympic swimmer who would become Tarzan, set world records in its pool, the largest hotel pool in the continental United States at the time.
The Depression killed the Florida boom and with it the original Biltmore. During World War II the Army Air Corps converted it to a hospital; it remained a Veterans Administration medical facility until 1968, then sat vacant for more than a decade. A painstaking restoration reopened it as a hotel in 1987.
The pool still gleams. The lobby still overwhelms. Order a drink at the bar and sit for a while with the weight of all that history.