MUSEUM & CULTURE
Henry B. Plant Museum
Hillsborough County · Gulf Coast
The south wing of the 1891 Tampa Bay Hotel, kept as a museum of the Gilded Age inside what is now the University of Tampa.
ABOUT THIS PLACE
Henry B. Plant, who built a railroad and steamship network across the south, put up the Tampa Bay Hotel between 1888 and 1891 at a cost of more than three million dollars. John A. Wood designed it in Moorish Revival style, five stories of red brick with six silver minarets, four cupolas and three domes, and those minarets are still the most recognizable thing on Tampa's skyline. The hotel opened on February 5, 1891, with 511 rooms, and Plant filled it with European art, furniture, clocks, tapestries and bronzes bought on buying trips between 1889 and 1891. In 1898 he offered the hotel to the army as a headquarters for the Cuban campaign, and Theodore Roosevelt stayed there while the Rough Riders drilled on the grounds. The hotel closed in 1930 and Tampa Junior College, later the University of Tampa, moved in by 1933. The building went on the National Register of Historic Places on December 5, 1972, and became a National Historic Landmark on May 11, 1976. The museum occupies the south wing and shows original furnishings in restored rooms
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