Dec. 25–CLEARWATER — It’s a winding maze of wooden walkways, shady grottoes, cascading waterfalls and green-carpeted fairways. Heck, there’s even a pirate ship.
For a quarter-century, families visiting Clearwater Beach and seeking a break from the sand and sun have been stopping by to play 18 holes at a miniature golf course called Captain Bligh’s Landing.
Now Captain Bligh and his pet parrot will have to walk the plank. The course’s owners have plans to replace it with a nine-story, 159-room hotel, possibly a Marriott.
It makes economic sense for the owners. The tourist attraction at 630 S Gulfview Blvd. is just across the street from the well-known Shephard’s Beach Resort and a number of other beachfront resort properties that are being developed or expanded.
“We think the golf course has kind of had its time. We built it 25 years ago,” said Anastasios “Taso” Anastasopoulos, who owns the property with his father, Elias “Louie” Anastasopoulos.
Still, many regulars who play the mini golf course year after year will mourn its passing. They say so when they visit and hear about the hotel plans.
Some locals will miss the place too.
“That’s very sad. It has been one of the things that made Clearwater Beach popular with families,” said Clearwater Beach activist Anne Garris. “I wonder who’s going to want to come to the beach when all we have to offer is high-rise condos and hotels, high-rise parking garages, and no views of the water except when you’re on the beach.”
Nevertheless, the Anastasopoulos family says the mini golf course is aging, and it’s time to make a change.
“The maintenance costs go up as it gets older,” said Taso Anastasopoulos. Recently, roots from one of the course’s lush palm trees burst a water pipe, requiring costly repairs.
From the course at the south end of Clearwater Beach, one can look across S Gulfview Boulevard at Shephard’s, which recently doubled in size. There’s also the future site of the Clearwater Beach Guesthouse, a 10-story tower to be built on a Holiday Inn’s parking lot; the future site of a 171-room Hampton Inn & Suites; the Wyndham Garden hotel, which is to replaced by a newer, bigger 14-story hotel; and a long-vacant lot where there are plans for a condo-hotel project called Marquesas.
Clearwater’s City Council has approved the concept of a 159-room hotel on the nearly 2-acre Captain Bligh site, with a rooftop pool, a 243-space parking garage and 18,000 square feet of ground-floor retail.
The specific plans must still be approved by the city’s development board, so there’s no specific timeline yet for construction.
The Anastasopoulos family is in talks to open an AC Hotel by Marriott. That’s a chain of mid-priced boutique hotels that are branded as urban and cosmopolitan, with European-inspired design. Miami and New Orleans each have one.
The family also owns an acre lot a block north of the Clearwater Beach roundabout, at Eastshore Drive and Papaya Street, where they plan to build a 134-room Courtyard by Marriott. Louie Anastasopoulos also built the Pelican Walk shopping center on N Mandalay Avenue in the early 1990s.
Captain Bligh’s Landing opened in 1989. In the years before that, it was a less fanciful-looking mini golf course called the Jo-Go Amusement Center.
The Anastasopoulos family got the city’s permission to construct the two-story course in 1988 despite neighbors’ worries about potential noise and glare. The owners said their course would provide entertainment for families — something that was sorely lacking on the beach.
Contact Mike Brassfield at [email protected] or (727) 445-4151. Follow @MikeBrassfield.
