History of Marco Beach: Part Three

Development of Marco Beach in the 1970s was reminiscent of the Roaring 20s in Miami Beach as high-rise condominiums quickly started filling in along its shore. With the December 18, 1971, grand opening of the new Marco Beach Hotel and Villas, the Deltona Corporation had created their crown jewel in the middle of the island’s 3.5-mile crescent beach. The luxury hotel was considered the pinnacle of achievement for the Mackle Brothers and the Deltona Corporation. Frank Mackle, Jr., Deltona's president, was so proud that he came up with a special dedication for his wife, Virginia.

“We opened the Marco Beach Hotel on her birthday,” said Herb Savage, the Deltona architect who designed the hotel, in a 2016 interview. “That hotel was the greatest."

The centerpiece of the Marco Beach Hotel was a 10-story, 400-room tower that cost $18 million to build. Governor Ruben Askew attended the grand opening. The Goodyear Blimp flew overhead.

Deltona continued systematically developing the north end of the beach throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s. In 1973, Deltona built the 17-story Admiralty House and the 12-story Tradewinds. In 1975, they added the 21-story Gulfview. The four South Seas towers, one 18-story tower, and three 19-story towers were built from 1980-1983.

But the south end of Marco Beach remained undeveloped through the 1970s. In fact, when Tom Williams came to work on the beach in 1978, the Marco Beach Hotel was effectively the end of the road.

"When I first came, there was nothing south of the hotel, and it was all sailboats,” said Williams. “We had five Hobie Cats and eight sunfish. It was our job to give people rides and teach them how to sail, rent the boats, and just take care of the beach. Rake the beach in the morning and make it look good. Just take care of the whole thing. We were proud to be good sailors. We were great sailors. We knew we were. We'd play with the boats all day ourselves. That was why we went to work.”

Williams soon had lots of company to his south. In the early 1980s, four timesharing resorts were built on the beach: The Eagle’s Nest, Club Regency, The Surf Club, and The Charter Club of Marco Beach. The Eagle’s Nest had catamarans, and the Charter Club of Marco Beach operated the largest fleet of Hobie Cats on the beach. The Marco Beach Hilton opened in 1985, and The Radisson (now the location of the Marriott Crystal Shores) opened in 1986. Both hotels had sailing operations. Colorful Hobie Cat and Sunfish sails provided a beautiful tapestry along the arching shoreline.

The 1970s also saw the rise of the Environmental Protection Agency, bringing increased scrutiny to the development of Marco Island. Suddenly, permits for fill and dredge operations from the Army Corps of Engineers weren’t so easy to obtain. 

The headline and subhead of a Forbes article by Harold Seneker in 1976 sums things up pretty succinctly: Deltona In Deep. This land company told buyers it would fill their swamps. But the Corps of Engineers refused to permit that. Now, the company itself may be swamped.

Indeed, without the ability to continue their fill and dredge operations in the environmentally sensitive mangrove swamps on and around Marco Island, Deltona suddenly found themselves treading water - especially when double-digit inflation sank their sales efforts.

"Deltona had to sell off a lot of their assets,” said Mark Bahr, whose father Neil Bahr was a prominent Deltona executive known as the Fourth Mackle Brother. “Had to refund all that money from the Marco Shores area. My dad's job was to liquidate those incredibly valuable assets, primarily the Marco Beach Hotel, for starters. All the other beachfront. The point and all the different lots to the south were sold off. My dad transitioned from being involved with Deltona into president of the Deltona Land and Investment Corporation to sell off all those assets to try to keep things rolling.”

The hardest asset to part with had to be the Marco Beach Hotel.

“My dad sold the Marco Beach Hotel to Marriott when Deltona owned it,” Bahr said. “It was a big deal. I think it was like $37 million. And then they immediately flipped it over to MassMutual, who I believe continues to own it."

The Corps of Engineers denied the dredge and fill permits to finish about a third of Marco,” said Marv Needles, who started with Deltona in 1969 and went on to a distinguished real estate career on the island. "Because of that, Deltona had to sell all of their beach properties. All the beach lots south of the Marriott were zoned for hotels, what's called residential tourist. Where Cape Marco is today, Deltona had a plan to put a big hotel there because they thought that gambling would end up being legal in Florida, and that was going to be their spot to have this casino and hotel.”

"So they ended up selling their beachfront property,” Needles continued. “The first that I recall was a group out of Canada that came along and bought the properties that became the Prince, the Princess, and the Duchess. Then, other groups came in and ended up doing the other development. The only two Deltona continued with were Summit House and the Royal Seafarer. And they had trouble with that because those buildings were under construction and the interest rates had gone crazy. They were putting furniture packages together - all kinds of perks - to try and sell that property. That was the end of Deltona doing any development on Marco.”

As the 1980s rolled in, Mark Bahr graduated from the University of Florida, where he was a competitive water skier, and settled on Marco Island, where he planned to begin a career in real estate.

“It was very difficult to sell real estate,” Bahr said, "whether it be raw land or condos or homes because the interest rate was so high. The recession was going on very heavily and Marco was nothing like it is currently. It was somewhat undiscovered. People knew where Naples was back then, but they really had not heard of Marco. At that point, I decided to try to make some extra money doing water ski lessons and instruction. I did it at the Marriott there. The second tower was under construction. The first one was already done. I just started teaching people how to water ski, taking them sightseeing on my outboard powered ski boat and started getting busy. It was a one-man operation, and it just grew from there. We started doing tube rides. Then we started parasailing off the beaches. Directly off the beach. Then that evolved into that big platform that was motorized. Then we went on to the winch boats, which is the self-contained take-off and land on the back of the boat, which you see now. And WaveRunners became popular. They were a more stable, user-friendly product that obviously became very popular.”

Rich Russell moved to Marco Island to work the beach concession at the Eagle’s Nest. He recalls a quiet beach in the early 1980s.

 “The big thing for me,” Russell said, "and I could tell you, we all remember what the beach was like. There were no businesses on the beach. It's hard to describe what it was like. It was a totally different island. There weren't very many people on Marco in the summer back then. I mean, it just was like the door shut and business dropped way off no matter what it was you did. It was like a four-month season. We had the county with Tigertail Beach, and it was just a bozo operation. Nobody had anything up and down the beach.”

"There wasn't windsurfing on Marco until I brought it there,” Russell asserts. "Because I opened up a company called Marco Windsurfing. Board sailing was popular during that era because it went very exponentially in its development into real high quality, real fast.

"The first WaveRunners on Marco Beach were at Tigertail because we didn't think the county was going to let anybody do it, and nobody with any brains would have bought WaveRunners at six grand apiece to put in when you couldn't do it. So they waited to see what happened at Tigertail. And they let them get away with it. So then other people jumped into it and they ended up having WaveRunners up and down the beach.”

Russell may have unwittingly started shelling excursions back in the 1980s.

"I just had two ski boats,” he said, "because I made so much money doing shelling and stuff like that. I ran ski boats, parasailing, and then I used to do shelling trips in the morning from the Radisson. I put them in the ski boat and took them down south of the island. You just pulled up and it was nice, calm water. And I would take eight or 10 or 12 or 20 people down there at $20 a head or whatever it was. And I would put them on the beach with the Radisson’s recreation director. Nice, nice young lady. And she took a cooler down and an umbrella. And they used to go shelling on that deserted beach. And then we would pick them up and bring them back.

"A different time and place and there were no big condos on the south end,” Russell said wistfully. There was nothing when I first got there. There was nothing on the beach. That was just different. A different time and place. It was way nicer. But that's the way the world works. I mean, how many people lived on Marco in 1985, 4,000 maybe? It was a great time. Oh, those were great days. Looking back on it, I realize I thought it was normal, but it turns out it was pretty neat. People could be from Chicago, Detroit, Boston, Buffalo, New York, wherever they're from. Doesn't matter. They're nice people. And they came down here and that's what they got into.”

Look for History of Marco Beach: Part Four next week in the Coastal Breeze News for a look at modern-day Marco Beach, reflections on the beach renourishment that may have saved it and a look to the future.