From Palm Beach County to Miami-Dade, 11 cities are celebrating their centennials in 2025 and 2026. WLRN News' series "History We Call Home" spotlights the moments, ideas and people that made these cities part of our community's fabric over the past century.
The City of Hollywood was imagined by its founder as a beautiful destination by the sea that could attract newcomers with glitz and glamour, like its California namesake. To anchor his newly founded city, Joseph Young conceived a luxurious hotel to welcome visitors and investors alike, and so embarked on a breakneck effort to build what would be the Hollywood Beach Resort Hotel.
A century after its founding, Hollywood has become what Young might have dreamed it would be: a tourist destination attracting visitors from all over the U.S.
The city has grown to a population of more than 152,000 according to the most recent U.S. Census, and it's far more diverse today than it was at its inception — with a majority minority population made up of 16% African Americans and 34% Hispanics.
Hollywood is home to Seminole Hard Rock Casino, which features performances by international musical artists and performers, while the Hollywood Broadwalk is a popular beachside destination for tourists and the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport brings millions of visitors to the area.
But after decades of struggles — and as Hollywood celebrates its centennial — the iconic hotel that helped birth the city is at risk of disappearing altogether.
A young developer
Young was a developer who arrived in South Florida in 1920 to survey land for a city he founded five years later — Hollywood. Young had lived in California, and historians believe that was his inspiration for the name.
At the time, people were flocking to South Florida in a tourism and land boom and Young wanted to build a place to house them.
Clive Taylor, president of the Hollywood Historical Society, said Young worked quickly to lure people to his city.
"He had to build a road to the beach. He had to build a bridge to the beach. And then he had to finally build this gigantic hotel — hundreds of rooms in 90 days," Taylor said.
But as droves of people came by train to South Florida in the mid-1920s, overwhelming railroads, officials banned freight from coming into the region by train. Only people and food were allowed to get here by rail.
"So all of a sudden during the biggest building boom South Florida ever saw there’s no way to get supplies here. So our industrious founder found a way. He got barges, sent them to Belgium for cement and got them up the Intracoastal and continued building this hotel," Taylor noted.
Young had people work 24-hour shifts, seven days a week. They used that solid concrete, which likely helped the hotel survive the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926.
That meant people in Hollywood could still use it — just not everyone.
'No Jews, no dogs, no Blacks'
"It was actually illegal for a Black person to live in certain sections of Hollywood. And then that carried over to the Jewish population. They could not stay in hotels. It was 'genteel' – code word for only Christian white people," Taylor told WLRN.
In the South Florida PBS documentary Grand Lady, Suzanne Badat spoke on her experience seeing discrimination at the resort as a child.
She remembers her mother trying to make a reservation using a Jewish sounding name, and they didn’t have rooms available.
"So that’s how we learned about antisemitism. And I remember as a kid, seeing signs that say 'no Jews, no dogs, no Blacks,'" Badat said.
After the stock market crash of 1929, Joseph Young lost his wealth and the hotel. Ironically, a Jewish man then bought it. After that, a series of other Jewish buyers owned the hotel.
Now Jewish people could stay in this fabulous hotel — and some historians say this contributed to Hollywood’s sizeable Jewish population that it has today.
It took several more decades before all people were allowed at the resort. But Badat and her family were eventually able to stay there.
"The hotel was absolutely elegant, the ambiance was magnificent, it was something like out of the movies, out of a Hollywood, California, movie set. Everything about it was beautiful and they had tremendous amount of staff, and there were a lot of kids here for Christmas," she said.
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But the 1940s and 50s brought more change — and new challenges to the hotel.
During World War II, in the early 1940s, the U.S. Navy ran a training school there. Then in the 1950s other glitzy and eye-catching hotels started popping up in South Florida — such the Fontainebleau on Miami Beach and the Diplomat in Hollywood — taking a slice of the hotel's tourism revenue.
As the Hollywood Beach Resort began looking dated in comparison, its owners come up with a solution: turn it into a hotel for conventions.
There was success as a convention hotel for some time, until the venue came on hard times again — and in 1971 it got sold to the Florida Bible College. It would then go through another transformation and potential redevelopment, but its owners eventually go bankrupt.
The hotel is deserted today, and Taylor as well as other preservations fear it will be neglected to the point of demolition, when an engineer says the building is not safe anymore.
"Wouldn’t it be a shame on our hundredth centennial that something would happen to our iconic building that Joseph Young built? If you take it away, our history will be meaningless because our history won’t be there anymore," Taylor said.
Hollywood Commissioner Caryl Shuham said the hotel's current owners were able to acquire title to the building. After multiple owners in recent years failed, Shuham hopes the current owners will finally be able to restore it. But no plans have been issued yet for a restoration of the building, and the hotel's future remains uncertain.
