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