The Sulphur Springs Tourist Club, known as the Harbor Club since 1985, is located at 915 East Grant Street. The view above is facing northwest from just across the
popular restaurant and bar and a second floor ballroom. In later years the riverfront building on 3 acres also contained a barbershop, television repair and retail shops. A postcard view form the 1940s shows the front of the club in it heyday. (Click to enlarge.) Notice on the left side are shuffleboards courts, always popular with tourists who flocked to 
11 comments:
This must have been really hoity-toity way back when.
Shuffleboard...I love it. But not too many folks play it anymore...
Well, maybe old guys smoking cigars!
Nice picture Frank. That reflection is awesome. I those dinning and dancing places must have been incredibly hot during the summers back in those days. I wonder if they took a dip in thee water tool cool off?
Please feel freel to participate in my "Weekend Reflections" meme it's at my Newtown blog every Friday through Sunday.
Any type of reflection photo. water,windows,mirrors,bald heads, etc.
I like the way you took this picture from across the water and caught the beautiful reflection of the building and the tree. This place must have been very popular at one time. I have always wanted to try shuffleboard!
Love the Clearwater Beach's Crabby Joe's is it? Great grouper!
@ Jacob - I could claim once to be a champion at shuffleboard but that's when cars had fins and I thought all girls had coodies. (I'm just old enough to enjoy a good cigar.)
@ James - Until air conditioning arrived, Florida was beastly. Huge attic mounted fans worked pretty well to draw air through cracked windows to provide a bit of cooling. A dance hall like this one without AC would be unbearable and the air rather pungent to say the least.
The natural spring is about 50 yards from this building. I bet a lot of folks cooled off there often!
I will try your Weekend Reflections this week. Sounds like fun. Thanks James.
@ Lois - You have NEVER played shuffleboard?? Horrors! It's a fast-moving sport that taxes every muscle in the brain and body. (Kidding, of course)
@ Birdman - I have eaten quite often at Crabby Bills on Clearwater Beach.
Fried shrimp and delicious grouper. Very popular place.
As kids in the early fifties, walking home from the Sulfur Springs Movie theater matinee, we used to stop by the spring in front of the tourist club and get a drink of sulfur water from the big artisen well housed in a little sunken privilion in the parking lot. We would meet the tourists filling big jugs up with the sulfur water to take home with them. They said it was the fountain of youth and good for you. It tasted awful but we were used to it. We watched them play shuffleboard. Right, a lot of them were old men with cigars.
Ahh, the Tourist Club. I remember my father getting the sulphur water and bringing it home. I didn't drink it, tasted awful. Dad said it was good for you. We lived less than a 1/4 mile from there.
How long did your father live after carrying the sulphur springs water home? I wondered if it was true as I drank what I could. SOO Cold. We had a pump and well water at our house at 7806 12 th Street. People who came to see us didn't like our water but we were used to it. Notice the amount of windows in the dance hall. That and fans is how they kept cool. Also shuffleboard outside. The old men wore their belts up past their navel and suspenders and good long pants and hats. They were from up north. I used to walk cross Nebraska avenue to go swimming in the Sulfur Springs pool. I loved it, snakes and all. My first job was lockerroom girl. age 12. I carried the keys to the lockers and cleaned the lysol footbaths. I played a lot of pinball.
Upstairs was another pavilion and Dance hall where the Swedish came to dance the Schottische, The Scandavian folk dance. They also said it kept you young.
I loved to watch them. Across the way was the mall with all kinds of stores and marble floors brass railings, Banks billiard hall where there were more old men smoking cigars. I was about 7 yrs old and afraid of them. On the side street beside the Springs Theater was a Lonely Hearts club, My mother said. I felt sorry for them to be lonely. Sulphur Springs was a small community in a big City.
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