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Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Island has been obscured by dream of Hilton Head
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Hilton Head Island, S.C. — It began as an island, and the island is still here, but you wouldn’t believe all the other neighbors who have attached themselves. Like barnacles. Ten, 12, 15 miles off the actual island they include themselves under the Hilton Head canopy. It’s good for the image, and I don’t know that the island folk bear any resentment.
Welcome to the club. The more, the merrier. Join in and spread the word.
Hilton Head, the island itself, is shaped like an old tennis shoe with holes in it. Those would be harbors and sounds and creeks and inlets. Hardly a foot of acreage has not been put to use. It didn’t happen overnight, but once the developers and risk-takers began to take hold, Hilton Head Island burst into bloomtown. They came from all over and staked out their claim, sometimes quite adequately financed, and sometimes fly-by-nighters. Some thrived, some survived, some bit the dust and some spent time looking at life through bars.
When I first landed on Hilton Head, the William Hilton Inn had just been completed, the first luxury — shall we say — hostelry on the island. There was a small motel with 14 rooms up the beach, the Sea Crest. That was it. You should see the Sea Crest today, in fact, both of them. They are towers of condominiums by the sea. In the island’s developing struggles I was offered the chance to buy a beachfront lot for half price. That would have been $4,500. I said thanks, but I couldn’t take the risk. Today it would no less than three or four million bucks.
There was one golf course. Sea Pines they called it, I think. Today there are 14 or 15 and several more, if you include all those off the island that have adapted themselves to Hilton Head. The island has its own PGA Tour event, and the field, coming directly after the Masters, usually attracts marquee names. And so has the tournament itself, which has had a handful of titled sponsors itself, but one has stuck with it through the years — The Heritage. The course on which the tournament is played was designed by Jack Nicklaus, in company with Pete Dye. Ironically, Arnold Palmer won the first, but Nicklaus made up for the intrusion. He won three of the first five.
In another way Hilton Head has distinguished itself, I’m told. It gave birth to the nation’s first roundabout; you know, one of those British circular intersections with no traffic light, in which it’s every driver for theirself, as Dizzy Dean would have said it. Even when the William Hilton Inn and Sea Crest were the only public housing on the island, it was laid out at what is known as Coligny Circle, and it’s still in place today, but not long for this world, rumor has it.
I have no idea what the year-round population of the island is, but one resident has estimated it at 20,000. Once there was a wildlife preserve in the middle of the island, a symbol of the motivation of the visionary whose idea this whole project was. There always is one, there has to be. One person who has dreams that only he can dream, and who fights off those who scoff, and who eventually puts it all together. That was Charles Fraser, a general’s son, physically unimposing but mentally at the top of the heap. He created Sea Pines, and other developers came billowing in behind him like the “Sooners Rush.”
Several made it, some didn’t, but in the real estate melee that resulted, Hilton Head became one of the South’s most appealing destinations. Among those who eventually tripped and fell on their own swords was Charles Fraser himself, but his dream lives on in his absence. He died in a boating accident a few years ago, just in his mid-years.
