Highway US-1 Brings Tourism to Downtown

With the construction of US 1 completed, Downtown Sanford became a popular stopover for an ever-growing number of motorists. The Wilkins-Ricks Company began construction work on the six-story brick and limestone-faced "sky scraper" in May 1924. By fall the reinforced concrete frame was up, inspiring accolades from the local press. "The stockholders of this hotel merit and receive the applause of the public for their vision and their manifestation of faith in the community. What they are doing will do more to put Sanford on the map than anything that has ever happened in the community.” The Hotel Wilrik and the equally grand Carolina Hotel, which joined it downtown in the late l920s, catered to the travelers who streamed through Sanford on their seasonal migrations to and from Florida.

Several tourist homes also opened in downtown; among the more stylish was Ida Coulter's at 503 Sunset Drive, one block from Carthage Street in the new McIver Park subdivision. The exotic Mediterranean styling of the Coulter tourist home related it to other automobile-age architecture in town: service stations with Spanish tile parapets and the Bowen Motor Company dealership at 234 Carthage Street, with its terra-cotta accents and fanciful parapets that distantly recalled the architecture of the California missions and, more to the point, fashionable hotels in Miami and St. Petersburg. Mediterranean-style residences like the Coulter tourist home and the even more flamboyant William R. Makepeace House on Hawkins Avenue (demolished) were the products of a new wave of experimentation in the domestic architecture of the period.