09/09/2026
Like a surfer that knows when to catch a wave, Navy veteran George âBobâ Gill Jr. arrived in Fort Lauderdale from Illinois in 1946. Initially a home builder and developer by 1949 he had turned to hospitality. On New Yearâs Eve of that year he opened the Escape Hotel in Birch Estates, the first year-round hotel in Fort Lauderdale with a swimming pool.
In 1953, a few blocks away, Gill followed the Escape with a trailblazing beachfront resort motel called the Jolly Roger. With air conditioning in every room it was a milestone in Fort Lauderdale hospitality history. From the imagination of architect M. Tony Sherman the Jolly Roger set the bar for the outlandish resort motel follies that would soon appear on Collins Avenue in Sunny Isles, on Biscayne Boulevard from Lemon City to Little River and along Fort Lauderdale Beach Blvd. across from the public beach.
The Jolly Roger is a pageant of a property and its face betrays its parentage. The broad low-pitched gabled roof is a larger-than-life expression of the American Modernism of Frank Lloyd Wright. The gable itself is not made of wood, stone or brick, it is an expansive, 30-foot-tall glass curtain wall. The theater-screen-size wall of glass is Shermanâs fantastic homage to the International Style Modernism personified by the German Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. During the Postwar decades such extensive use of glass would have been regarded as âultra modern.â Sherman took the glass curtain wall a mile further by curving it where the hotel meets the street corner. The curved glass curtain wall wraps the interior circular ramp connecting the lobby to the third floor. In the midst of motel stagecraft, form ever follows function.
Like an upside-down banana split in a glass tumbler Sherman piled references to mid-century popular culture one on top of the other. The improbably broad and low-pitched gable was crowned with a curved, asymmetrical parapet embedded with colored spheres that lit up at night. The feature was the spitting image of the parapet of the Wonder Bakery at the 1939-40 New York Worlds Fair, the World of Tomorrow. Sherman sought to evoke the futuristic wonder of the World of Tomorrow and did so by selecting this appropriately whimsical element. The motif of the multi-colored circles on a white field ricocheted from the fair to supermarket shelves to the Jolly Roger to the pantries of the new American middle class.
Pirate movies were big in the early 1950s. Released in 1950, Walt Disneyâs Treasure Island became a massive box office hit. It was followed by Last of the Buccaneers later that year, Anne of the Indies in 1951, and the Crimson Pirate and Blackbeard the Pirate in 1952. With that concentrated saturation of popular culture, the only question is âwhy wouldnât the third scoop in Shermanâs vertical sundae be a pirate theme?â
And this was an urbane motel. With its widescreen countenance on A1A it would have been one of a set with the motels of Sunny Isles. But in the gridiron of Birch Estates, it was a corner property, a condition that did not shape motels on the typical roadside strip. Facing the interior of the block the ground level houses behind-the-scenes support functions. Toward Auramar Street the ground level extends into the generous setback to accommodate the pool deck. To effectively shield the pool from the street, Sherman combined the 10-foot distance between the street and ground level with a terraced strip of landscaping rising up from the pool deck. This arrangement eliminated the need for a high wall along the sidewalk. The resulting five-foot wall is sufficiently high, while allowing the hotel room galleries on the second and third levels to animate the street.
The playfulness borne of sophistication, the blending of modernism with references to pop culture and period styles and attention to urban context displayed in the Jolly Roger puts Sherman in league with the two masters of South Florida vacationland architecture Morris Lapidus and Charles McKirahan.
Rediscovery of the pirate ship on the public beach begs in-depth research into Sherman and his body of work. The Jolly Roger, the Yankee Clipper, the Crossroads in South Miami, the Congress Hotel on Ocean Drive and the Jerrico Apartments in North Beach are the treasures weâre aware of. Whether these represent the tip of an iceberg or a record of quality over quantity, me must know more.
