The Beach That Invented Puerto Rican Tourism

Puerto Rico's tourism industry has a birthplace, and it is this stretch of Atlantic sand. Before 16 October 1919 there was no destination resort on the island's north coast. On that day the Condado Vanderbilt Hotel opened at the western point of Condado Beach, and an industry started that the island still runs on.

Two Brothers and a Bridge

The story does not begin with a Vanderbilt. It begins with two brothers, Hernand and Sosthenes Behn, sugar brokers who had moved into telephones, running the South Porto Rico Telephone Company from 1905. They owned land on the Condado sandbar between the Atlantic and the Condado Lagoon, and they wanted to make it reachable and valuable.

Their first move was infrastructure. In 1908 they began building the Dos Hermanos Bridge, "Two Brothers," across El Boquerón, the inlet where the Condado Lagoon empties into the sea. It opened on 22 May 1910 and connected the Condado sandbar toward the San Juan islet and Old San Juan. The bridge turned a spit of land into buildable, sellable frontage.

Convincing a Vanderbilt

A bridge alone does not make a resort. To anchor the district the Behns needed a name and a building, and they went after both. They persuaded Frederick William Vanderbilt, son of William Henry Vanderbilt, to invest in an oceanfront hotel on their land.

Vanderbilt hired Warren and Wetmore, the New York architecture firm then finishing Grand Central Terminal. Construction began in 1917 and cost roughly one million dollars. The result was a Spanish Colonial Revival building with white walls and red tile, facing straight out to the Atlantic. It opened on 16 October 1919 as the first luxury hotel built for tourists in Puerto Rico.

The Glamour Decades

The Vanderbilt did what the Behns intended: it put Puerto Rico on the map for wealthy travelers. Its early guest list ran to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, the aviator Charles Lindbergh, the actors Errol Flynn and Bob Hope, and the pianist Arthur Rubinstein. When Puerto Rico legalized gambling in 1940, the hotel opened the island's first hotel casino, sharpening its role as the center of Caribbean luxury tourism.

The brothers, meanwhile, had gone global. In 1920, the year after the hotel opened, Hernand and Sosthenes Behn founded International Telephone and Telegraph. Hernand served as its first president until his death in 1933, by which point its assets had grown past $500 million. The same two men who built a bridge and instigated a hotel on a San Juan sandbar went on to build one of the largest corporations in the world, and the Condado waterfront was where their fortune first took physical form.

A Century of Building Behind the Sand

The Vanderbilt drew the rest of the district in behind it across the following decades: the La Concha resort, the San Juan Marriott, the Condado Plaza, and the Ashford Avenue corridor of hotels and storefronts marketed as the "Puerto Rican Fifth Avenue." Condado became the densest urban shoreline in Puerto Rico.

The Vanderbilt itself did not have a smooth century. It closed on 30 June 1997 and sat derelict for years. The original 1919 structure was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2008, and after a restoration reported at $270 million it reopened in stages, its main building in 2012, on the 93rd anniversary of its 1919 debut, and its twin towers in 2014.

The Public Window

For most of that century the Condado waterfront was walled off behind private hotel frontage. The counter-move came in 2004, when the city opened La Ventana al Mar, a public seafront park on Ashford Avenue designed by the Puerto Rican architect Andrés Mignucci. It carved an open plaza and public beach access out of the hotel wall and went on to win awards from the American Institute of Architects Puerto Rico chapter and international architecture biennials.

La Ventana al Mar is where the history closes back on itself. It is the piece of the shoreline the tourism industry gave back to the public, on the exact sand where that industry started. The Behns' bridge, Vanderbilt's hotel, and Mignucci's park are three chapters of one story about who gets to stand on the Condado shore, and it has been running for more than a century.

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