My parents spent their honeymoon there. My Aunt Faye and Uncle Harry had their high school prom there. They wanted to dance on the Beach Walk, but the 17-year cicadas were swarming, so they had to stay indoors in the Marine Dining Room. I don’t remember the place, but I do remember my dad driving us by in 1970 to watch it being demolished. We sat in the back of his black Thunderbird while he took home movies of the wrecking ball crashing into the pink stucco structure.
In 1929, the Edgewater Beach Apartments, also designed by Marshall, opened a long block north, on the far side of the hotel’s tennis courts and garden.
Agnes Redemski lived in the Edgewater Beach Hotel from 1927 to 1930, and she remembers listening to the Paul Whiteman and Wayne King orchestras on Friday nights. “Back then,” she said, “you could get a large lemonade for $1.25 and it lasted the whole evening.”
I remember when they were building it and I remember the sad days when they had to tear it down floor by floor. The idea was that the building would never collapse. An atom bomb wouldn’t have brought it down–they crisscrossed the steel beams so well. An earthquake might have cracked the walls or the plaster, but we thought it would never fall down.
Romeo Meltz, bartender, bandleader: When the Beach Walk opened in the summer, I was promoted to bartender. That’s when the big bands were playing on the Beach Walk and people would be dancing. And then, when the set was over, all the waiters would come over because everyone wanted to be served at the same time. So we had to set up the drinks before. Like we had trays and trays and trays of scotch and bourbon poured, fixings for mint juleps and crap like that.
Alice Ann Knepp, Dorothy Hild dancer: Dorothy Hild was terrible to work for. She was very unpopular, but she got results. She would always have some kind of big production number. We did a Polynesian theme with Freddy Martin’s band. Our job included room and board and our salary was $30 a week. If you lived at home, the girls got $40 a week. We were free to choose what we wanted from the menu. At the time, we left a ten-cent tip for the waitress.
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We had to cope with bugs. They were horrible. Plus we always had animals when we worked out there, elephants and all of those good kinds of things, and you had to cope with what they did on the floor. You’d have to step over it gracefully. But we got along very well. For a bunch of women, we did real fine.
