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Ask Margaret by Margaret Word Burnside The entire 400,000-square-foot, 380-guest room, turn-of-thecentury Belleview Biltmore Hotel, which until it closed in 2009 was considered to be the largest occupied wood frame building in the world, will not and could not possibly be moved. By 2015, when CEO Mike Cheezem and his JMC Communities purchased the 20-acre property in Belleair for $6.2 million, its vintage “White Queen of the Gulf” hotel and out buildings had fallen into irreversible disrepair. Fortunately, St. Petersburg-based JMC Communities has already proven its dedication to communities’ surroundings and histories and to its tasteful designs and executions with its earlier Tampa Bay area projects such as the Florencia, Ovation and Rowland Place in St. Petersburg, the Mandalay Beach Club, Belle Harbor and the Sandpearl Resort and Residences on Clearwater Beach and Victoria Place in Dunedin. In like manner, JMC is dedicated to preserving the long-standing elegance and hospitality of the original Belleview Biltmore Hotel and its surroundings. By the time this article reaches you, JMC will have orchestrated the monumental relocation and repositioning of part of the historic Belleview Hotel, as it was named when it was first built. Specifically, the hotel’s 38,000-square-foot lobby with its grand staircase and 14-foot-high suspended ceiling and 35 adjoining guest rooms, will have been moved 320 feet, measuring from its existing center to the center of its new foundation. The structure containing the lobby and rooms also will have been turned 90 degrees clockwise to become the Belleview Inn boutique hotel and the focal point of JMC’s upcoming Belleview Place property’s newly landscaped Belleview Boulevard entrance road. The mechanics of a move such as this are a modern marvel. The five-story, nearly 65-foot-tall building weighs 1,740 tons and is 156 feet long. Steel reinforcement beams had to be placed and bolted crossways on top of the lobby’s width, from side to side and from front to back for support. The building’s five brick chimneys required reinforcement in readiness for the move. Wolf House and Building Movers from Bernville, Pennsylvania, spent six weeks onsite with JMC’s Design and Development Superintendent Steve Wood preparing for the move, which they helped oversee. Besides preparing a foundation and footings for the new location, which took 50 truckloads containing 500 cubic yards of concrete to construct, a wide ramp was excavated and smoothed over between the building’s old and new positions to accommodate the move. The entire lobby and guest room structure also needed to be 140 TAMPA BAY MAGAZINE | JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017 lifted about four feet higher. This was accomplished by using a Unified Hydraulic Jacking System. The process is controlled by a single operator to ensure that each of the jacks receives identical amounts of oil and raises up at exactly the same rate, no matter how much weight or pressure each one is handling. The lift’s uniformity assures that the building will remain completely level and undisturbed during the entire move. Forty-seven, eight-wheeled hydraulic, computerized, remotecontrolled power and coaster dollies were designed and built especially to move the building. Some, not all, were powered, as they worked in sync to turn the building to its proper position. The dollies also were controlled remotely to move the structure at about a quarter of a mile per hour to its new foundation. Once the lobby and guest room structure was seated in place on the foundation, the cribbing piles were replaced under it, the dollies were removed, and the jacks were reinstalled to adjust the height. After masons built a wall around the foundation, the steel beams were removed and the holes were filled. Actual renovations could not begin until approximately four weeks after this process. Although the lobby and 35 guest rooms will be refurbished and saved, the irreparable damage caused by long-term neglect have rendered the overall Belleview Biltmore Hotel and its surrounding structures beyond help, at least in their current state. However, JMC is committed to meticulous deconstruction to salvage and repurpose every possible piece of the structures’ history. Windows, doors, hatch doors, transoms, framing and architectural features, as well as heart of pine wood floors and beams are being painstakingly removed of nails and sorted for Will the Belleview Biltmore Hotel actually be moved to a new location as I have heard? S.P., Treasure Island


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