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www.sunherald.com
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 24. 2013
The ‘Jewel of the Gulf no longer sparkles
An industrial giant bulldozed the Pink Lady who had worn the “Jewel of the Gulf’ title with pride.
Some might claim that a bridge and Black Tuesday started her decline 60 years earlier, but the modern culprit was a pervasive American attitude that does not cherish the architectural past.
The Pink Lady was the Pine Hills Hotel, rarely an “it” to locals or those who vacationed on the Mississippi Coast in the Roaring ’20s. The Pine Hills was a “she,” as if the stucco building at the head of the Bay of St. Louis was animate. Her debutante com-ing-out lasted a mere three years in the post-World War I prosperity that ended with the Oct. 29,1929, stock market crash. But that was long enough to nick history, when this promise-filled region was the Golden Coast.
A respite from winters
“Enjoy winter where it is always spring,” touted a December 1926 national advertisement for the Pine Hills’ opening. “Tea on the broad terraces brilliant with sunshine, golf on a sporty course of hazardous fairways and velvety greens, a brisk canter through pine-clad hills, fishing, swimming and sailing, tennis, and in the evening, wonderful music that just makes you dance.”
The 180-room luxury hotel was centerpiece of a complex that included a golf club and the Pine Hills-on-the-Bay residential park. All the Coast’s offerings — pristine outdoors and seashores, peace from big-city bustle, gambling and drinks that belied national prohibitions — were available to guests.
Declared Hal Thompson, a nationally known hotelier, operations manager and shareholder:
* “Nct’rng can be found in Pine Hills Hotel which will not compare favorably in beauty, value and comfort with that found in the homes of the wealthy who will be guests of the hotel.”
Such praise explains why the Pine Hills was
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COAST CHRONICLES
Kat Bergeron
BergeronKat@gmail.com
nicknamed Jewel of the Gulf, Pink Lady, or simply The Lady. Even in the worst of times, dignity reigned. In 1972, a Daily Herald reporter observed of the abandoned jewel, “She stands like a gracious lady, a little more stooped now, wrinkled...”
Expensive construction
Built and furnished for $1.7 million — $22.7 million today — the exterior was described as Spanish and the interior as Spanish and Italian Renaissance. Furnishings were chosen by Albert Pick & Co. of Chicago and New York, and draperies fashioned after European palaces. Staff catered to the whims of spoiled patrons accustom to a lifestyle similarly depicted in the popular PBS series” Downton Abbey.” A stock market ticker tape machine allowed them to keep tabs on their wealth.
The Pine Hills was one of a half dozen so-called Grand Dame hotels built in 1926 and 1927 to cater to the wealthy of New Orleans, the Southeast and well-heeled, cold weather refugees from Chicago and points north. The Edgewa-
ter Gulf, The Buena Vista, the Tivoli, they, too, are gone. Two 1920s hotels, Gulfport’s Markham (built to cater to men on port business and now in serious need of restoration) and Biloxi’s White House Hotel (empty for decades and in need of restoration), are all that remain from that era. The others fell victim to hurricanes, neglect and/or the bulldozers of progress.
The Pine Hills first jolt came on Black Tuesday. Patrons who rushed home to salvage their wealth never returned. One major bank and many individual investors who built the hotel went bankrupt.
Great Depression did her in
The Great Depression permanently shut the Pink Lady’s doors to paying guests. The resort was also now “out of the way” because a bridge was built at the other end of the bay. To get from Henderson Point to the town of Bay St. Louis, drivers now preferred the new 2-mile bridge to the old 32-mile trip on the Kiln-DeLisle Road that took them past the Pine Hills.
The Bay St. Louis Bridge opened in 1928 and in good times would not have struck a significant blow. A few miles of inconvenience for such luxury mattered little, but compounded with the Depression the Pine Hills could not rebound.
Temporary uses
In 1940, it was considered as a site for a naval seaplane base and in 1942, the rooms became temporary barracks for overseas-bound World War II soldiers. In 1953 the hotel was bought by the Oblate Fathers, a Catholic missionary order that restored it to use as scho-lasticate for training ministry students until 1968. Attempts to find new purpose for the old hotel, including as a condominium village, failed despite creation of an accessible interstate. Then in 1984, the neglected hotel was bought by industrial giant DuPont, which five years earlier had opened the nearby DuPont DeLisle titanium dioxide plant.
Final demise
DuPont paid $2 million for the hotel and 80 acres, saying it wanted the land as buffer for its DeLisle plant and that hotel restoration was too costly. The Pine Hills Historical Society failed to convince DuPont otherwise and wrecking balls reduced the Pink Lady to rubble in November 1986.
Kat Bergeron, a veteran feature writer specializing in Gulf Coast history and sense of place, is retired from the Sun Herald. She writes Coast Chronicles as a freelance correspondent. Reach her at BergeronKat@gmail. com or c/o Sun Herald Newsroom, P.O. Box 4567, Biloxi MS 39535-4567.
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The Oblate Fathers, a Catholic missionary order, restored the Pine Hills Hotel in the 1950s and for 15 years used it as a college-level scholasticate to train ministry students. The old hotel, which had survived several bad hurricanes, was torn down in 1986.
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