We followed the movie with a trip to Dixie Grocery/Wine/Beer Liquidators (in the same strip mall) and perused the aisles of dent-and-bents, past expirations, and food/drink experiments gone horribly wrong. (Canned pork brains in milk gravy, anyone?)
I thought I had scored with a 2-liter box of Pinot Grigio for $3.99 until Tom, the store owner, said it had grapefruit juice in it, and that several customers had returned it because they thought it tasted rancid or spoiled. "You just have to get used to the taste," he said. Back on the shelf it went. In it's place, I bought a 1.5 liter bottle of Terramare Bianco (not Blanco), which oddly enough is one of the house white wines served at the Carrabba's Italian restaurant chain. How cases of this stuff ended up at a grocery liquidation store, I don't know, but it tastes pretty good (at least to me) and it was just $7.99. Anyone else tried this? Comments?
There hasn't been a whole lot going on since my last blog entry of a couple weeks ago. We are now in the height of "season" here, and traffic is horrible, especially to the beach and to Sanibel Island. We kind of stick to the pool here at the condo for swimming, and to our "neighborhood" of Cypress Lake for groceries, restaurants, etc. I do make the occasional run to the Gulf Coast Towne Center shopping mall for massages, and also for a great bakery/cafe there called Calistoga. They are another Panera Bread clone, but they are not nearly so busy, so it's a great place to go for coffee (really good coffee by the way) or a snack, or to just sit and read and/or surf the 'Net. Starbucks, I'm afraid, has become too much like a family circus what with all the sugary noncoffee drinks aimed at the kiddies.
I found out about this place via a new meetup group for e-commerce folks in southwest Florida. I attended the inaugural meeting at the Calistoga Cafe and Bakery along with eight other people, and we had a great time sharing ideas and resources. The people there were of all knowledge levels and specialties of expertise. I got a lot of good ideas about promoting my watch web site and also my Hamilton watch book. I don't know if there will be a followup meeting by the time I leave, but we'll see. Someone in the group already started a Facebook page (closed group) but there hasn't been an entry in seven days, and a query that I posted nine days ago hasn't rec'd any kind of reply so far. So this may just be another "flash in the pan" meetup group, but I hope it continues. Even if it doesn't, I came away from this initial meeting with two pages of notes ... probably more stuff than I would have gleaned from a $500 e-commerce workshop!
The other major event was a Trendy Tours bus trip to Palm Beach to visit the Breakers Hotel/Resort, and also "White Hall," one-time summer house to Henry Flagler (HF) and family, and now the Henry Flagler Museum. The museum in 2004 added a Solarium which houses a restaurant (Cafe des Beaux Arts) and serves display room for HF's private rail car. Our tour included lunch at the pavilion, along with guided tours of the hotel and the museum. The two venues are at opposite sides of the Palm Beach island and less than 2 miles from one another. In between, and up and down the island, reside some of the wealthiest in America, including what is now the "Winter White House," Mar-a-Lago, for Donald Trump, on the southern tip of the island. Palm Beach is joined to the mainland (West Palm Beach) via two bridges, and we got a little bit of bus ride along the WPB main drag, lined with art galleries, and Jaguar and Ferrari dealerships. I guess the real estate on the island of Palm Beach is too expensive for commercial real estate, save for the Breakers Hotel and Resort, where we learned that rooms start at $1,200/night, and there are no deals on kayak or trivago! (If you want to stay there during off-season, you can get a room starting at $600/night).
Both our tour guides at the Breakers and the museum were very knowledgeable, though I wish our group of 40 people had been broken into two groups at the museum, which was the former HF estate. Our guide at the Breakers broke us into two groups of 20 which was much better. We got to tour many of the public areas, but not all because several areas where being set up for private gatherings including two of the three ballrooms (we got to the see the Mediterranean Ballroom) and the grand courtyard.
The museum was another in the line of fabulous mansions built by the great robber barons of the gilded age. There was little in the way of artifacts of HF the builder/entrepreneur; it was strictly about his domestic life, at least as it pertained to the two months per year that the mansion was in use. There were grand dinner parties and cotillions, and parties of every sort. The mansion contains a huge dining room, billiard room, and parlors, one complete with pipe organ and player piano. Like most of these grand mansions, the Great Depression put an end to the festival of excess, and White Hall stood vacant, a white elephant passed from generation to generation. Then, in 1959, it was sold to a development company which started to tear it down, but ran out of money after building a 300-room, ten story addition to the west side of the building, obliterating Flagler's offices, the housekeeper's apartment, and altering the original kitchen and pantry area. At that time, one of HF's granddaughters (by marriage, by the way, not even a blood relative) stepped in and bought the mansion and tore down the 10-story addition. The "bald spot" on the mansion's ground floor was not restored as a permanent reminder of what almost happened to the place.
For those who've never heard of HF, he was the co-founder of Standard Oil, and was probably only exceeded in wealth by a few of his contemporaries, including John D. Rockefeller himself. Yet history gives him scant notice. But he is probably the man most responsible for turning Florida's east coast from a swampland into a tourist destination. Starting in St. Augustine, he worked his way south to Miami by acquiring short line railroads and building his own railroads where none existed to link the rails into his master railroad, the East Coast Railway. Along the way, he built grand hotel/resorts in various cities as retreats for the wealthy. Not content to stop in Miami, he spent $50 million of his own money to build an overseas railroad all way to Key West, completed in 1912 and destroyed in a hurricane in 1935. Much of the foundation for the railway survives to this day as the bedrock for the Overseas Highway (Highway 1) which connects Miami to the Keys, ending in Key West.
What many do not know about HF is that he also started the citrus industry in Florida. For every acre that Flagler purchased for his railroad, the state of Florida deeded him an additional eight acres. He turned much of this acreage into orange groves, employing thousands in the process. Thus began the annual winter shipments of oranges to the north, and of course fresh citrus for the guests in his many luxury hotels along Florida's east coast.
Though revered by many, especially in these parts, HF was as ruthless as any robber baron of his era. He was the architect of Standard Oil's interlocking trusts, which gave Standard Oil a monopoly on the transportation of petroleum from the oil fields of Pennsylvania and Kentucky, to the company's refineries in Ohio. So strong was the monopoly, it took the United States Supreme Court to break it up in 1911.
HF's acquisition of short line railroads along Florida's coastline were no doubt hostile, and of course his master railroad, the East Coast Railway, was built on the backs of immigrant labor, as were all railroads of the day. So to deify him as a great benefactor is probably a bit over-stated. But still, I find him to be one of the more interesting robber barons of the Gilded Age, if for nothing else than having the vision to build a railroad over open ocean. And, just like Rockefeller and Carnegie and others, Flagler's descendants would go on to become some of America's great philanthropists.
Anyway, a very fun day spent in Palm Beach. I got to sip coffee and eat a croissant on the Palm Courtyard of the Breakers, which is as close as I'll ever come to being a guest there. Lunch at the Flager Museum's "Cafe des Beaux Arts" was also a treat and consisted of a "high tea" type luncheon with finger sandwiches and desserts served on a tiered platter and accompanied by pink lemonade and hot brewed tea.
I'm planning on a couple more trips with Trendy Tours and I'll report on those in the future.
Bye for now,
Bruce
Flagler. Interesting. I remember plying the streets of Miami in 1962 to find the 7th District Coast Guard HQ in Miami and traveling Flagler Avenue. They put me up in a nifty downtown hotel overnight, where upon arrival, I saw a dazzling beauty kiss a dashing man in a polo shirt as he departed the hotel. I thought I'm in LaLa Land. That's all I know about Flagler. It was still a time of grand luxury and I got to stay in such a hotel one night. Then I went to St. Pete, where we winter now.
ReplyDeleteAs to the pork brains, it sounds disgusting, but then there's a great cheese called head cheese. Look it up. Nice report Bruce.