The Old Hotel

 

the old Naples Hotel

 
The old Naples Hotel as it was, standing near the pier and what is now the swanky Third Street shopping district in Naples Florida. It had been a landmark since the late Nineteenth Century but was well past its prime when I lived there as a youngster. The place was closed down and demolished decades ago. A new Naples Hotel, looking rather like the original, is now rising in much the same spot. I doubt it will attract quite the same sort of clientele as the old one.

The Hotel has appeared in my Women in the Sun novels, set in the late Sixties, but only in passing, not as a setting for any of the action. It was an object of nostalgia already in 1968. But I remember walking past it on my way to the pier in the evenings, with guests sitting on their screened porches, the scent of citronella wafting into the dusk. That will never come back, whatever they build.