The Palm Beach Post                                                                                                                                                     

Sun, Aug 4, 1968                                                                                                                                                                

Page 37  

by Patricia Collins, Staff writer

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OFF IT COMES

The right cupola of the old Keystone Hotel on Datura Street is gingerly lifted from its moorings, on its way to become a gazebo in the new min-park on Clematis Street. Use of the crane was contributed by Merle W. Merchant, Inc., and transfer to the park was through the courtesy of U and Me Transfer.

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Rescued from the soon to be rubble at the site of the proposed second municipal parking lot on Datura Street is the good right cupola of the Keystone Hotel, a 60-year-old landmark in the city of West Palm Beach. The cupola is to be used as a gazebo summer house, or shelter in the new mini-park on Clematis Street.

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The motive was economy and resulted from a spark of ingenuity from Frank Frazier, executive director of the Downtown Development Authority (DDA), which promoted the park construction. The DDA has been searching for months for a drinking fountain shelter which would not “do in” its tight budget. Frazier, when inspecting the site of the parking lot project,  which the DDA also promoted, focused on the cupola as an answer to an innovator’s dream.

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The surgery took place on Tuesday, as the turret was carefully cut from the roof structure, lifted by crane and deposited on the truck, which transferred it over and down the street to the park. Once the cupola is gussied up with paint and firmly fixed to the concrete as a gazebo, it will protect the fountain and shelter shoppers from the midday heat or rain.

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The rest of the Keystone will come down to make way for the parking lot on Datura west of Dixie highway, which is expected to be completed by November.

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Little is known about the hotel except that it was constructed around 1907 by Benjamin Cook, father of Ruthie Cook Bowler, 214 Sunset Road. Her recollection as a little girl of the building was: “Yankees used to go up there (the cupola)  to have their pictures taken.”

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H. C. Whipple,  who was a resident of the hotel in 1913 and now lives directly across the street in the hotel which he owns, can recall little about the Keystone except it was once at the site of his hotel and home.  Whipple bought most of the furniture from the Keystone and transferred it to the arcade adjacent to his hotel. “Everything in the arcade,” he said,  is for sale. “Everything,” includes mountains of mattresses, curtains, chairs, pictures and assorted odds and ends.

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Whipple tags himself as ambitious and slightly eccentric for emptying the hotel of its almost historical belongings.

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Fort Lauderdale News                                                                                                                                                  

 Sat, Aug 31, 1968                                                                                                                                                            

 Page 4                                                                                                                                                                               

 By Charles Cabaniss

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Old Landmark Destroyed

West Palm Beach -- A 43-year-old West Palm Beach landmark -- the Keystone Hotel -- is gone. The structure, when its walls came tumbling down, carried with it a story of the nostalgic days of pre-World War II.

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The history of its forty-nine rooms are headed for the inglorious finish of becoming a landfill, clearing the site for a half block of modern city buildings. With the Keystone goes another reminder of the Florida boom days of the 1920s/ The hotel was typical of the turn-of-the-century architecture with turrets and balconies and other oddities of an earlier era adorning its frame, clapboard structure. The turrets were actually gazebos whose sitting places were scarred by the use of thousands of guests who occupied its rooms over years.

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In its early heyday, the Keystone was considered among the more fashionable of West Palm Beach hotels along with the demolished Salt Air Hotel and in Lake Worth. The Salt Air gave into progress in the early 1960s. One Keystone  gazebo was removed to clear the way for a garden setting or the city’s new park on Clematis Street.

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A central figure in the early days of the Keystone was H Clarence Whipple, who lived across the street in another hotel which once housed employees of the plush Palm Beach Breakers Hotel, and was also once named the “Keystone.” Whipple, 83, and an encyclopedia of memories, said he stayed at the first Keystone at 424 Datura Street, built by Benjamin Cook in 1913. He said he remembered playing checkers with Cook on the front porch of the hotel.

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 The “new” Keystone had guests coming back each winter for more than twenty years. The original Keystone will remain. Whipple who bought the Keystone in 1942, stares across at the “new” Keystone and feels “it’s a shame.” He admitted the building is plagued with termites. When Whipple stayed at the Keystone, he had the only sign shop in West Palm Beach. Whipple recalls he did what was then unique workmanship with bulbs numbering more than 1,000 with prisons.

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He said, “I’ll say that $700 ( the cost of the sign) in those days was a lot of money. Whipple was a charter member of the old Palm Beach Art League and a charter member of the local Rotary and Chamber of Commerce, both founded in 1914. He recalled that in 1913, he had the chance to buy 100 ft on Datura Street extending from the FEC railroad tracks, now occupied by the Grand Hotel.

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He said later it sold for $250,000 in the boom days of 1925 when the Keystone Hotel was built. A native of Quitman, Georgia, he has seen a lot of history made in South Florida and has a lot of memories of the Gold Coast growth..