From Postcards to Pretty Girls: St. Petersburg’s Seasonal Hospitality in the 1910s–20s

Florida’s winter season began to arrive long before jet travel and theme parks made the state a year-round destination. By the 1910s and 1920s St. Petersburg’s hospitality calendar already revolved around an annual reopening for “winter visitors.” Hotels timed their schedules to welcome early snowbirds who fled northern chills and sought mild weather, seaside promenades, and the social life of a resort town. Local newspapers and chamber promotions treated those autumn reopenings as more than business. They were civic rituals that signaled renewal and a return of outside interest in town.

Hotels prepared in practical and theatrical ways: housekeeping crews polished ballrooms, staff schedules were adjusted, and seasonal programming was rehearsed. Promotional campaigns ran in northern papers, often featuring postcards, colorful brochures, and the era’s famous bathing beauties. As columnist Jane Graham observed, “Naturally, the best manner of selling St. Petersburg’s sunshine was through the medium of the pretty girl,” while city publicity director John Lodwick became a master of the medium, ensuring the city’s image reached far and wide.

The Vinoy Park Hotel, opened in 1926, was the city’s most deluxe resort and a major promotional asset. Its physical presence and programming attracted well healed visitors and national attention. The hotel’s management used both spectacle and signal to mark seasonal change. Lighting the Vinoy’s tower became a civic tradition. For many residents the illumination of the tower each winter was a visible cue that the season had arrived and that downtown life would hum with visitors, concerts, and dances.

Other downtown properties adopted similar rituals. The Soreno and several smaller inns arranged seasonal concerts, golf events, and card parties that filled rooms and lent an air of continuity from one winter to the next. Advertisements promised “perpetual summer” skies and modest rates meant to reassure budget conscious travelers that Florida’s warmth was affordable. Postcards and newspaper copy performed much of the work of creating expectation, while local merchants added banners and welcome windows to meet arriving guests.

Taken together, these practices show how tourism was a cultivated social project. It was not merely about weather. It was about staging comfort, leisure, and hospitality so that a city could transform for half the year into a place of rest, spectacle, and exchange. For St. Petersburg those autumn reopenings and the small public rituals that accompanied them remain part of the city’s civic memory and help explain how tourism became central to the local economy and identity.

Explore more about the Sunshine City at the St. Petersburg Museum of History today.