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This November, as thousands of attraction industry professionals from around the globe flock to the Orange County Convention Center (OCCC) in Orlando for IAAPA Attractions Expo 2011 and gaze around at the expansive convention center district, few might know the tale of the very humble beginnings of the International Drive corridor that the OCCC calls home. Or the improbable story of its rise to prominence as an economic juggernaut.
It is the story of a road that has gone from being nonexistent in 1970 to one of the busiest tourist boulevards in the world.
“This place is a bunch of entrepreneurs, one by one,” Kelly Smith, a real estate development attorney involved in IDrive projects for more than 30 years, told the Orlando Sentinel in 2005. “I’ve never seen anything like it anywhere else ... It’s been the Wild West of capitalism.”
Of course, it all began with the announcement by Walt Disney in 1965 that he would build a new theme park complex south of Orlando. Finley Hamilton, a local real estate attorney, spotted an opportunity about five miles up Interstate 4 from where Walt Disney World was being constructed. So in 1968, his company paid $90,000 for around 10 acres of land about a quarter-mile north of Sand Lake Road, accessible only by a dirt path. There he built the Hilton Inn South, which he unveiled in May 1970, hoping guests flocking to Walt Disney World when it opened 17 months later would spot his hotel from nearby Interstate 4.
Though his friends originally called the hotel “Finley’s Folly,” it flourished. Hamilton and a partner proceeded to buy 28 more acres to sell to hotel developers. They finished paving the one-and-a-half-mile strip between Kirkman Road and Sand Lake Road, and since Hamilton had built the original segment for his hotel, he got to name the new road. He called it International Drive because he said “it sounded big and important.” Today, the old Hilton Inn South is now the CoCo Key waterpark resort.
 George Millay, who founded the first SeaWorld park in San Diego, California, in 1964, was the next to show up in Orlando. He purchased 125 acres for his new SeaWorld Florida, which opened in 1973. Millay said The Walt Disney Company actually encouraged him to build the park because the area needed more attractions to bring people in. SeaWorld was located off the Bee Line Expressway (now SR 528), two miles south of I-Drive’s end at Sand Lake Road; at the time, there was no road linking the two locations.
In 1974, the next entrepreneur appeared on the scene in the form of Harris Rosen. He had recently been fired from Walt Disney World, so the 34-year-old partnered with Alan and Joanne Dayton, investors from Palm Beach. He bought the 256-room Quality Inn on Sand Lake Road. The country was in the midst of a deep recession brought on by the Arab oil embargo, and widespread gasoline shortages had a devastating effect on tourism, so Rosen and his partners were able to buy the hotel for only $150,000 cash and assumption of the mortgage.
He actually lived at the hotel for years with his dog, Rin-Tin- Tin, because he said the purchase took every penny he had; he served as security guard, food and beverage manager, and landscaper. In 1975 he hitchhiked through the Northeast selling blocks of rooms to bus companies for $7.50 to $8.50 per night to keep the hotel afloat.
Today, his Rosen Hotels and Resorts comprises 4,200 rooms in several hotels on IDrive, including the Rosen Plaza and Rosen Centre, and an additional 1,500 rooms at the nearby $300 million Rosen Shingle Creek resort. As for the old Quality Inn that Rosen bought in 1974, Ericka Cotton, senior producer, editor, and host of Orange and Vision TV, which recently created a captivating multipart series on the history of International Drive, says, “That Quality Inn is still there and Rosen still has his office in it!”
The Man with the Plan
In 1956 the Glenn L. Martin Company, which later became Martin Marietta aerospace, purchased 7,300 acres around Sand Lake Road to build a missile factory. The company created Orlando Central Park (OCP), a 4,300-acre office and industrial development, and in 1975 named Jim Brown, a 44- year-old electrical engineer from Texas, as its president.
The company was prepared to sell 722 acres for a development it named Plaza International, and Brown created a master plan that would prove to be the foundation of the astounding evolution of International Drive south of Sand Lake Road. This is the area of which the massive OCCC is now a part.
But Brown shuns any suggestion that he knew how successful the area would become. “I know some people would tell you that they had a vision in 1969 and that today it’s a photograph of that,” Brown tells Funworld. “But I’m an honest man—I would never say that!”
OCP sold the land to restaurant, hotel, and retail developers, earning $97.5 million for just this portion of the property alone—50 times what Martin had paid in 1956 for the original purchase of the entire 4,300 acres.
Meanwhile, Millay, who left SeaWorld in 1974, had been itching to build a waterpark and chose a 12-acre site creation. He worked with Elmer “Al” Slavik, a developer from California who bought the land for $4 million and leased it to Millay, while also investing $2 million in rides. In March 1977, Millay opened Wet ’n Wild, promoting it as America’s first waterpark. In 1998, he sold Wet ’n Wild and two other waterparks he owned to a subsidiary of Universal for $41 million. Slavik’s heirs still own the land, which is now valued at around $25 million.
In 1978, after much political posturing and debate over several competing sites for a convention center, Orange County voters approved a Tourist Development Tax to build the complex and later selected a site on International Drive near the Bee Line Expressway as its future location.
The OCP had donated 70 acres for the convention center on International Drive, and of all the many significant events in the evolution of I-Drive over the past 40 years, Brown says the convention center approval is the one he considers most significant to the area’s success. “The community actually failed to pass the tax for the convention center the first time,” he recalls. “Then we offered our site and we were able to get a referendum passed, and we built that twomile part [of I-Drive] there between Sand Lake Road and the Beeline.” The convention center opened in 1983.
In November 1986, the convention center gained a desperately needed large marquis hotel when the Peabody Orlando opened directly across I-Drive. The 27-story, 891-room flagship hotel was the result of a partnership between Jim Brown and Marty Belz, the owner of an outlet mall on I-Drive. Belz had experienced enormous success with his outlet center since it opened in 1981, and he had hotel experience garnered from his ownership of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee.
Becoming an Irresistible Force
Between 1987 and 1999, the convention center underwent three phased expansions. During this period, the I-Drive area seemed to gain an unstoppable momentum. Universal Studios opened in 1990, and its sister park, Islands of Adventure, debuted in 1999. Hundreds of restaurants, retail stores, and hotels appeared, and major attractions like the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! and WonderWorks museums opened.
One of the attractions that appeared during this period is Fun Spot Action Park, a family entertainment center (FEC) located off I-Drive a couple of blocks west of the intersection with Kirkman Road. Its owner, John Arie Sr., is another of IDrive’s remarkable success stories. For years he owned a small FEC called Fun ’N Wheels near the intersection of I-Drive and Sand Lake Road until he sold it in the mid-1990s. He then built Fun Spot, which he opened in 1998.
Through two recessions and the tourism slump following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Fun Spot has thrived. In fact, it has thrived so much that in 2007, Arie opened Fun Spot USA, an amusement park in nearby Kissimmee, Florida. On top of that, earlier this year his International Drive park announced it had purchased land for an expansion that will triple the size of the five-acre park.
As for the role that parks and attractions like Fun Spot, SeaWorld, Wet ’n Wild, and WonderWorks have played in the successful evolution of International Drive, Brown says, “I just think they are full blood brothers in the development. I think they’re just a natural part of who we are and what we are.”
With the opening of the new North/South Concourse at the OCCC in 2003, the recent expansion of the Peabody Orlando, and the opening of the Hilton Orlando adjacent to the convention center, International Drive now boasts some startling statistics. According to the International Drive Mass Transit and Improvement District, the I-Drive Resort Area is home to six theme parks, 17 attractions, two entertainment complexes, 550 retail stores, 200 restaurants, and 35,883 rooms among 107 hotels and resorts. It’s the second-largest convention center in the United States.
Says Brown, “I’d say the master plan we originally had has played out much better than I would ever have imagined!”
Contact News Editor Keith Miller at kmiller@IAAPA.org. Funworld wishes to extend special thanks to Ericka Cotton of Orange and Vision TV for the invaluable information she provided for this story. For a comprehensive and engaging video production on the history of International Drive, visit www.orangetvfl.net and search for “history of I-Drive.”
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