Lost Biloxi by Boudreaux Edmond

Author:Boudreaux, Edmond [Boudreaux, Edmond]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2015-09-21T04:00:00+00:00

16

Tivoli Hotel

During the aftermath of Katrina, Biloxians let their lives fall into an almost ritual mode. They went about their lives numb to their surroundings. The sounds of hurricane-destroyed homes and businesses being removed by heavy equipment and hauled away by any type of vehicle available became a normal occurrence. Gradually, most of these sounds died away and were replaced by the sounds of hammers, power tools and other construction equipment. The recovery has been very slow but, for the most part, positive.

One morning, I was working and was kind of enjoying the birds singing in the nearby trees and the relative quiet of that morning. Then, I realized that in the background I could hear the sound of heavy equipment moving on its tracks as it worked itself into position and then quiet again; the equipment had stopped. The quiet was short lived because the next sound I heard was a heavy object striking something solid. The solid object had not held though, and the next sound was like hundreds of thousands of pieces of glass showering to the ground. It didn’t take me long to realize that the sound was a wrecking ball striking the Tivoli Hotel. What had sounded like glass were the shattered pieces of brick raining down the sides of the hotel to the ground. The once grand Tivoli had been the product of the 1920s, and like many of its sister hotels from the same period, its physical history was coming to an end.

During the mid-1920s, the Mississippi Gulf Coast was referred to as the American Riviera of the South. Some of the older hotels had been remodeled magnificently while newer ones—like the Pine Hills Hotel in Bay St. Louis, the Markham Hotel in Gulfport and the Gulf Hills Hotel in Ocean Springs—were being built. The years between 1925 and 1927 saw the construction of five new hotels in Biloxi. They were the Buena Vista, the Avelez, the Tivoli, the New Biloxi and the Edgewater Gulf Hotel. When the Tivoli Hotel opened its doors, its rooms were referred to as apartments. It had twenty-four two- and three-room apartments for its guests and sixty-four regular hotel rooms. The four-floored Tivoli stood tall and proud among the huge oaks that lined Biloxi’s East Beach. The lobby was built with a barrel-style vaulted ceiling with a grand ballroom on one side and a large dining room on the other.

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