Henry B. Plant Museum

A gilded-age Moorish fantasy palace that launched Florida tourism — now a museum inside the University of Tampa

The Henry B. Plant Museum occupies a wing of what was originally the Tampa Bay Hotel — a spectacular 511-room Moorish Revival palace completed in 1891 by railroad magnate Henry B. Plant. The building now houses the University of Tampa, but the museum preserves the original Victorian-era furnishings, decorative arts, and historical artefacts from the hotel's gilded-age heyday.

The museum is genuinely surprising. The Tampa Bay Hotel was built at enormous expense ($2.5 million in 1891 dollars) with the explicit purpose of attracting wealthy winter tourists to Florida. Plant filled it with European antiques, art, and furnishings bought wholesale from the great houses of the old world. The collection represents a snapshot of late-Victorian taste at its most extravagant.

The Spanish-American War section is the most distinctive part of the museum. In 1898 the hotel served as the headquarters for the US Army's Tampa command as troops assembled for the invasion of Cuba. Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders were billeted here, and the officers' mess was in the grand dining room. The exhibition covers this episode with original artefacts and photographs. The building exterior — dominated by thirteen Moorish minarets — is best viewed from across the Hillsborough River.

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A story
Henry Plant built his Tampa Bay Hotel in 1891 specifically to attract wealthy Northern tourists to his railroad empire. The minarets visible from across the Hillsborough River were meant to suggest exotic grandeur; what Plant actually created was the first luxury resort in Florida. One guest in 1898 was Theodore Roosevelt, who used the hotel as a staging point for the US Army's invasion of Cuba during the Spanish-American War — the lobby where officers planned the campaign is now the museum's main gallery.