by Bailey White
Staff Writer
From a window on the 24th floor of the Bank of America tower, where she works as an administrative assistant, Helen Chitty can watch as The Vestcor Companies transforms the Roosevelt Hotel on Adams Street into the the Carlington — a makeover that will leave the 1926 building with 100 loft apartments and 15,000 square feet of retail space.
Chitty is especially interested in the project because the Roosevelt is where she spent the first seven years of her life. It was the Carling Hotel and her father was its general manager.
She was Jacksonville’s version of the famed Kay Thompson book character, Eloise, who lived in New York’s Plaza Hotel.
“I remember watching the implosion of the Mayflower Hotel [another old hotel in Jacksonville that was demolished in 1978],” she said, “and I was thinking, ‘I hope they don’t do that to the Carling.’ I’m so excited by what they’re doing to preserve the history of the hotel and the city.”
In the early 1930s, when Chitty lived there with her parents, C.D. and Grayson Macilwaine, the hotel attracted a host of celebrities, including Jimmy Durante, Rudy Vallee and the heavyweight champion Primo Carnera.
“He was enormous, a real bruiser,” she said. “I thought he was a giant.”
Chitty remembers that her father, who could play music by ear, would sometimes take a break to entertain her and her mother on the piano in the ballroom. She remembers the drugstore in the lobby where her mother bought her a sweet roll every day. She remembers requesting the song “Margie” from Clyde Gardner’s Orchestra, the group that played in the dining room.
An only child, Chitty spent most of her time with her mother.
“We’d walk to the Kress department store every time the windows changed,” she said. “We’d walk to the park on Main Street [Confederate Park] to get our exercise. I can’t imagine trying to raise a small girl in a hotel like my mother did.
“We couldn’t take up too much space because it had to be reserved for the guests,” Chitty added. “And I had to leave my toys — my doll carriage and my tricycle — out in the hallway. And always, following a convention at the hotel, I’d have to go looking for my tricycle because someone would have imbibed too much and taken it for a ride.”
Chitty wasn’t allowed to keep pets inside “so I kept rabbits on the roof, and I had a little turtle in a bowl on the windowsill.”
Without a kitchen in their room, the family took all their meals in the hotel’s dining room, which meant Chitty had to be dressed up and on her best behavior.
“I learned to have manners,” she said. “And I think I developed a certain amount of poise since I was usually around older people.”
But that doesn’t mean she never got in trouble.
Once when she was misbehaving, her mother prohibited her from entering the lobby for an entire month.
“I don’t remember exactly what it was that I did, but I do remember that I marked off the days on a calendar and that I had to ride the freight elevator up, where they kept all the vegetables for the kitchen,” she said. “I was such a prissy little girl, and I loved that people made so much fuss over me, so it was a long month to get through.”
Eventually, Chitty’s father was transferred to the Palmer Inn on Davis Island near Tampa, where he worked as a manager before the family returned to Jacksonville.
“I was in the fourth grade by then,” she said, “and it was the first time we had our own home.”
Now Chitty, and her husband, John, who spends his day at the Duval County Courthouse as a liaison between the State Attorney’s Office and the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, live in the Venetia area of the city. They raised three children; two daughters live in Chicago, and a son lives here.
Chitty spent 17 years working as an aide for U.S. Court of Appeals judges Bryan Simpson and Warren Jones before retiring.
“But I was home for four months, and I couldn’t stand it anymore,” she said.
She got a job with Barnett Bank 14 years ago, staying on through two mergers.
Whether or not she and her husband will take a unit at the Carlington, Chitty has yet to decide.
“It would be fun,” she said. “It would be like coming full circle again.”