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As Time Goes By

August 23, 2003 1:07 am

IDROVE TO HAMPTON the other day to sit for a while with my old, ailing friend, the Hotel Chamberlin.

The hotel and I go back to 1955, when I was 10 and my parents took us kids there for a rare vacation from the routines of our Northern Neck farm. Over the years, I kept up the tradition by taking my own children to the Chamberlin many times. Now, the grand old place may be dying. When I heard the news, I knew I must return, perhaps for the last time, to the scene of so many memories.

The Chamberlin's doors opened in 1928. They were locked in April. In June, the company that owns the hotel filed bankruptcy a day before a foreclosure auction on the courthouse steps. The Chamberlin's owners say the hotel is a victim of Sept. 11, 2001. Of course, no airplane struck the Chamberlin, but its owners say that the venerable Hampton Roads landmark, about 130 miles east of Fredericksburg, was strangled to death by intensified security measures on Fort Monroe, the Army post that surrounds the hotel.

The Chamberlin is owned by a subsidiary of Pelican Properties International Corp. of Orlando, Fla. Things looked rosy when Pelican bought the Chamberlin in 1998 for $5.35 million. The company negotiated a new, 40-year $6,000-a-month lease with the Army for the 5.5 acres on which sit the hotel, its parking lot, lawns, tennis courts and swimming pool. Major renovations of the property began. Pelican said it looked forward to the hotel producing income of $3 million a year.

But in April, Pelican Chairman Gorham Rutter Jr. told the Newport News Daily Press that the Chamberlin's business had dropped 72.4 per cent since 9/11. Only six employees worked at the hotel that once had a staff of 145. Just a few of the hotel's original 283 rooms were rented and those, ironically, to Fort Monroe military policemen. Rutter said his company could no longer afford to pay $100,000 a month in debt service and other expenses to keep the place open.

"This property can no longer be a hotel," Rutter said. "We've gone as far as we can go with putting money into this property. The Army will be the victor here because they can outlast us."

Said another Pelican official, "We can't receive walk-in traffic for the hotel because no one will come up to a gate with an armed soldier and wait for a day pass in order to get on the base."

Not long after Rutter spoke to the paper, the Chamberlin's staff was fired and the doors locked. Among its many debts, the hotel owed the electric company $32,067 and the natural gas company $28,770.

At least I had my memories. Like Labor Day weekend of 1999, when squalls from Hurricane Dennis swept over Hampton Roads. My wife and I, two other couples and our children went to the hotel for the weekend. That Saturday afternoon, the wind was blowing 40 knots and it was raining. The women and children went to the movies. Steve, Bill and I went to Buckroe Beach near Fort Monroe and watched windsurfers fly across the stormy waters of the Chesapeake.

Back at the hotel, a warning came over the radio that a tornado was headed for Fort Monroe. The power went out. I was frightened. I peered out the window of the room, expecting to see a funnel cloud in the dark, ragged gloom outside. I was worried about my wife and kids. When they finally showed up, they said the power had gone out at the movie theater. We heard later that the tornado had struck near the theater, wrecked five apartment buildings and two nursing homes, hurt 15 people, left 1,000 homeless and caused $8 million damage.

The closing of the hotel denied Stephanie Leary and Kevin Gross a happy memory. They are among 26 couples listed in the bankruptcy who had paid $500 deposits to hold weddings and receptions in the hotel's elegant ballroom or its eighth-floor garden terrace.

The Chamberlin was a favorite Tidewater place for fancy parties, Sunday brunch and Christmas and Thanksgiving dinner. You never knew what color tuxedo or bridesmaid's dress you would see in an elevator.

Stephanie's mother, Sally Leary of Portsmouth, said they booked the Chamberlin ballroom last November for the Oct. 11 reception, which will now be held in a Holiday Inn.

"The Chamberlin is such a beautiful place. We were all excited about it. Stephanie loves old architecture, and she and Kevin both love the water. The Chamberlin is one of the most beautiful settings on the Chesapeake Bay. Kevin's family were all coming from New York and were all excited about staying at the hotel. We were surprised it closed.

"When we made our reservation last year, they were making so many renovations to the place. Everything looked so clean and nice. We looked at some of the rooms. They were old but fine, and we had no qualms about recommending them to Kevin's family.

"We checked with Fort Monroe security and they said that people coming to the wedding needed to show their driver's licenses, registration cards and proof of auto insurance. We were ready to deal with that. I just hope we get our deposit back."

Fort Monroe is a 570-acre Army base at the mile-wide mouth of the James River. A sign at the guardhouse says that Old Point Comfort, as the area is also known, was first fortified in 1609 when English settlers mounted cannon there to discourage the Spanish from troubling Jamestown 45 miles up the river. The 63-acre, seven-sided fort, known as the Gibraltar of the Chesapeake, was completed in 1834, its mile-and-a-quarter-long moat filled by Chesapeake tides.

Fort Monroe was an important base for Union forces in the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln visited in 1862, and Confederate President Jefferson Davis was imprisoned there after the war. In the wars that followed, Fort Monroe's massive artillery protected the narrow channel to Hampton Roads, as the harbors, military bases, shipyards and other industries of Norfolk, Portsmouth, Chesapeake, Hampton and Newport News are collectively known. Fort Monroe's strategic importance ended after World War II when aircraft and guided missiles obsoleted coastal artillery.

Now, Fort Monroe is a campus of historic buildings where the Army's Training and Doctrine Command creates lesson plans for the Army's many schools. About 1,200 soldiers and 2,200 civilians work at the base. Many of Fort Monroe's 732 officers and their families live in stately houses on tree-shaded streets, one of which is nicknamed "Generals' Row." On the earthern ramparts of the old fort are dozens of little gravestones marking the burials of dogs, cats and other pets of base personnel. Fort Monroe is also home of the U.S. Continental Army Band, which performs regularly at a charming bandstand in a park by the hotel. Nearby is a 324-slip marina reserved for the pleasure craft of U.S. Department of Defense employees.

All of these seemingly docile activities at Fort Monroe are now protected by the military's strict security measures. Before my recent visit to the Chamberlin, I found two Web sites about Fort Monroe security. The sites warn base personnel about individuals who "appear to be conducting surveillance of Ft. Monroe facilities; are asking questions about Ft. Monroe mission, personnel, equipment or activities; searching through trash or garbage containers; taking pictures of sensitive areas, or asking questions about entry or exit requirements." Such suspicious activities should be reported to 1-800/CALL-SPY, one site advises.

I was certainly not planning to rummage through the post's garbage, but I fretted that my reporter's questions, notes and pictures about the Chamberlin and its peculiar relationship to Fort Monroe might attract the scrutiny of the military police and ruin my sentimental visit.

I remembered our visit to the hotel in February 2002. My wife had taken a solo vacation, and I took our two kids to the Chamberlin for a few days. In most respects, it was our standard stay at the old place. We swam in the hotel's indoor pool, watched the endless parade of ships from the window of our room, wandered through the brick-and-stone chambers of the Casemate Museum in the old fort, and visited the Air and Space Center in Hampton and the Mariners' Museum in Newport News.

But things had changed at the Fort Monroe gate. Before 9/11, the sentries waved you in and waved you out. Five months after the terrorists' attacks, military police in combat gear asked us our business. A Humvee with a mounted machine gun was parked nearby. Barricades were everywhere.

At the hotel barbershop, I got a haircut from Duke Osborne, an 80-year-old man who had been cutting hair at the hotel for 40 years. After 9/11, Osborne said, the MPs at the gate removed the seats from his car when they searched it on his way to work. A hostess at a restaurant told me that the line of cars waiting to get through Fort Monroe security after 9/11 stretched a mile back into Phoebus, the Hampton neighborhood near the base.

On my recent visit in July, the security climate was milder. The gauges on the security Web sites were well below the red zones of highest danger. The indicator of the local threat level blinked a green "low." The force-protection condition level flashed yellow "Bravo," and the homeland terror level was a yellow "elevated."

It took me about 10 minutes to get onto the base. I was third in a line of cars. Off to the side, I watched soldiers searching a UPS truck, a moving van and an office-supply delivery truck. Eventually, a sentry in a black beret motioned me forward. He wore a battle dress uniform and toted two M-16 rifles, one slung on each of his shoulders. I was tempted to ask him why he was carrying two rifles, but I resisted the impulse. Such a question about personnel, equipment and activities might have put me on the screen at 1-800/CALL-SPY.

The sentry was a pleasant young man. I handed him my driver's license and vehicle registration card. He asked me where I was going. I told him the Casemate Museum. He wrote everything down on a clipboard, handed me a blue day pass to display on my dashboard, told me to have a nice day and waved me in.

Casemates are masonry rooms for cannon fired through openings called embrasures. Fort Monroe has about 200 of them along its seven bastion walls. Now, 14 of these low-vaulted chambers inside Fort Monroe are a museum filled with exhibits about the long, rich history of the place.

Admission is free, but museum attendance has declined 35 percent since Sept. 11, 2001, a secretary told me. In 2000, nearly 60,000 people toured the Casemate. In 2002, the number dropped to 39,052.

"In their minds, the public thinks they have to go through a lot of red tape to get on the base," she said.

One exhibit tells the story of the hotels at Fort Monroe that once made Old Point Comfort one of the East Coast's most fashionable resorts.

The first hotel at Old Point Comfort was built in 1822 and named the Hygeia after the Greek goddess of health. President Andrew Jackson stayed there in 1829, and President John Tyler in the 1840s. A month before his death in 1849, Edgar Allen Poe, who had served 20 years earlier as an Army sergeant major at Fort Monroe, charmed the ladies on the Hygeia's moonlit portico with a recitation of his poetry. During the Civil War, the Hygeia's upper floors were razed because they interfered with the azimuths of the cannon at the nearby fort. The hotel's ground floor was used as a military hospital.

After the Civil War, the Hygeia was rebuilt by local entrepreneur Harrison Phoebus to provide 1,000 guests with "Turkish, Russian, thermoelectric, magnet, mercurial, sulphur, vapor and hot sea baths," as well as "gas lights, hydraulic elevators and bathrooms on every floor."

In 1887, Congress allowed John F. Chamberlin to build a new hotel at Fort Monroe. Chamberlin eventually bought the old Hygeia and tore it down. Chamberlin's first hotel was destroyed in a spectacular fire in 1920. The present hotel, an eight-story Georgian wonder with two lofty towers on top, rose from the ashes and opened in 1928. In World War II, the military ordered the removal of the Chamberlin's towers, which were visible from the Atlantic Ocean 20 miles away and might have helped target enemy attacks. During the war, the Navy commandeered the hotel to house bachelor officers.

I parked in the hotel parking lot. The Chamberlin's doors were plastered with notices. The windows were dusty. The hotel's grass and hedges needed trimming. Pickets fell from fences. Magnolia leaves littered the sidewalks. Grass sprouted from cracks in the shuffleboard courts. The swimming pool was empty except for a couple of feet of stagnant rainwater in the deep end. Paint peeled from the enormous arched windows of the dining room on the first floor.

A sign on Duke Osborne's barbershop said, "Good-bye after 52 years as a barber, 41 at Chamberlin Hotel, 11 at Post Exchange. Thank you for your patronage throughout the years!!!!"

A pickup truck with Minnesota plates parked beside me. A man got out and headed for the hotel. In a few minutes, he came back and asked me, "What's the deal with this hotel?"

I told him the Chamberlin closed in April.

He said he had just arrived at Fort Monroe for an Army conference and his TRADOC hosts had put the Chamberlin second from the top of a list of places for attendees from out of town to stay.

"I wanted to stay here. I thought this place would probably be absolutely packed. With all the people stationed here, wouldn't you think they would know the hotel was closed?" he said.

He told me he was Col. Robert W. Burns of the Army National Guard Readiness Center at the Pentagon. I told him I was a reporter. He told me he had majored in English in college. Me too, I said. I told him my wife was from Minnesota. He said he was from Fridley, Minn.

It was hot that morning. We walked up the steps of the deserted hotel and peered through windows and locked doors. The ornate white woodwork of the immense and elegant lobby vanished in the darkness at the far side of the building. As best I could see, the glass cases in the lobby were empty of the photographs, china, cutlery and other artifacts of the hotel's long history that used to be on display. Stacks of chairs filled conference rooms on the lobby floor. A trayful of glasses sat on a table in the bar. The colonel was sure he saw bottles full of liquor on the shelves.

We found shade, breeze and a couple of benches on the hotel's wide brick veranda. Sixteen tall brick arches framed the views. Every arch framed a memory. Through the arches on the left, I could see Fort Monroe's Victorian bandstand on its perfectly manicured lawn next to the hotel's overgrown lot. I remembered an Easter service at the bandstand a few years back. The Army band played, a community chorus sang and a close-hauled ketch just 100 yards off the seawall beat silently toward the rising sun.

Through the arches on the right, I could see the building a quarter-of-a-mile away that marks the western end of the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel. When I was a boy, ferries carried the U.S. 60 traffic from Old Point Comfort to Willoughby Spit on the Norfolk side. And near the ferry landing was the terminal for the Old Bay Line steamers that once ran up and down the bay. I remembered seeing the bright lights of the Washington steamer race across the darkness of the Potomac on Northern Neck nights long ago.

Through another arch, the enormous silhouettes of aircraft carriers and other warships loomed in the haze four miles away at Norfolk Naval Station.

But the arches in front of the colonel and me framed the scene that had first enraptured me when I was 10, and never let me go. Just a half-mile away, all kinds of vessels sailed past us, one after another on their way in and out of Hampton Roads: destroyers, patrol boats, merchantmen, tankers, container ships, tugs, barges, dredges, sailboats, yachts, trawlers, fishing boats, and some boats whose purpose I couldn't quite fathom.

The colonel couldn't get over how close and big the ships were, and how fast they moved. It was "like watching a massive tornado pass over an empty North Dakota wheat field," he said, as vessel after vessel passed before us in a parade as eternal as the wind that first brought ships to these waters.

"God, this is fabulous," the colonel said. "My God, what a spot. This place is lost in time."

We had the hotel all to ourselves. I wondered how many strangers before us had become friends while sitting on that spot, as the view changed over the years from white clouds of sail to black clouds of smoke from coal-fired boilers to the deadly silence of nuclear power.

I told the colonel what happened on our family vacation at the Chamberlin in August 1955. I think it was the first time any of us farm kids had been in a swimming pool. The water poured into the pool from the mouths of four cast-bronze lions' heads (still there, but dry-mouthed). I wrote on hotel stationery to a friend back home and bragged that I could swim from one end of the pool to the other. My sister remembers bowling for the first time in the hotel bowling alley. And I remember one night when we avoided the hotel dining room because the Hungarian goulash special was just not our Northern Neck idea of food.

While we were there, Hurricane Connie struck with winds about 60 mph. We were stuck in the hotel all day. It was Aug. 13, 1955. The wind shrieked and howled around our corner room. The rain poured under the French doors to our balcony.

When the storm cleared out, dozens of Navy ships returned to Norfolk from the open ocean where they had gone to ride out the blow. At breakfast the next day, I watched them with binoculars through the big window by our table in the dining room. Aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers, submarines, every ship in the Atlantic fleet passed by the hotel that morning.

We had to leave for home that day, but I wanted to stay and watch the parade on the water. The family left me in the dining room at the table by the window while they packed up. Before long, they came back and told me that the car was loaded and it was time to go home. Just one more ship, I begged. No, they said, it's time to go.

I was in the morning of my life then. Now, in the afternoon, I sometimes think of the night ahead. I have thought the Chamberlin wouldn't be a bad place to lie down and watch the ships once more before my final time to go. But it looks like the hotel will die before I do.

"Sad" is the word everyone uses when they talk about the closing of the hotel. I told the colonel that nobody thought it would ever open again as a hotel. Its future seems to lie in the military world, perhaps as a vacation spot for military families, or a home for military retirees or offices for military business.

The colonel offered a counter proposal.

"Perhaps they'll make use of Fort Monroe as a headquarters or an emergency off-site base. Or maybe the post will be returned to the people, as has happened with so many other military bases."

It was time for us to go. We talked on the way down the veranda steps to the parking lot. He said Fort Monroe reminded him of Fort McCoy, Wis., "another quiet, beautiful little outpost of history tucked between Sparta and Tomah. It's hard to imagine either Fort Monroe or Fort McCoy as a desirable terrorist target."

Fort Monroe, Fort McCoy and who knows how many other military posts are sealed up tight from the communities that surround them. Now, U.S. military bases are like foreign countries with armed guards at the border crossings.

I told him how, in the old days, I used to take the children on stem-to-stern tours of ships at Norfolk Naval Station. You can't do that anymore.

"I don't think we'll ever see things the same way again," said the colonel. "The kids growing up today will just get used to the lack of freedom. They won't even know what it was."

FRANK DELANO is a staff writer with The Free Lance-Star.