The Ground the Astronauts Swam On

I drive past 1300 North Atlantic a couple times a week, same as most of you. The cranes have been up for a while, the towers keep climbing, and the new Westin is finally starting to look like a real building instead of a promise. The other day I got to wondering what that piece of ground has actually been through before any of this. Turns out it might be the most Cocoa Beach story there is. Astronauts, a Holocaust survivor with a wicked sense of humor, a motel fire on opening night, and now a $420 million resort. All on the same strip of sand.

Here's the whole arc.

Before the motels

Long before A1A, this was Ais country. The Ais lived up and down this coast for centuries. After the Civil War, freed slaves built the first settlement out here, a little community some folks called Oceanus. A hurricane in 1885 hit it hard, and by 1888 a group of Cocoa men bought up the whole tract and mostly left it to the palmetto and the snakes.

Then came Gus Edwards. He was a Georgia attorney who showed up around 1915 and became Cocoa's city attorney almost overnight. Where everybody else saw scrub, Gus saw oceanfront. He bought big, cleared the land with mules and hired crews, and planted hundreds of Australian pines. Some of those trees are still standing. He pushed hard for the first bridge, which opened in 1922, and he got the Town of Cocoa Beach officially incorporated on June 5, 1925. He was our first mayor. Lots were going for a hundred bucks. People raced cars on the beach. The lights came on that same year.

For a long time it stayed tiny. The 1939 census counted 49 people living here. By 1949 it was up to a whopping 246. Then the rockets showed up and everything changed.

The Holiday Inn years, when this was the center of the universe

Banana River Naval Air Station, which later became Patrick, opened in 1939. The first missile went up from Cape Canaveral in 1950. Once the space program got rolling, this quiet beach strip turned into the front row for the biggest show on Earth.

The Starlite Motel opened in 1956 as the first real hundred-room place in town. Running it by the mid-fifties was a guy named Henri Landwirth, a Belgian who had survived the Holocaust and come to America with twenty dollars and not a word of English. The Mercury 7 astronauts and the whole press corps made the Starlite their home base.

Then in 1960 the Holiday Inn opened right here on this site. Around 500 rooms on close to sixteen acres of oceanfront. It was one of the first big national hotels in Cocoa Beach and it instantly became the biggest game in town. Landwirth came over to manage it. The Mercury astronauts basically lived there. Walter Cronkite and the networks set up shop. Johnny Carson stayed. When Alan Shepard flew Freedom 7 in 1961, the Holiday Inn turned into the nerve center for the entire national press. Reporters turned their hotel rooms into darkrooms. By the time John Glenn went up to orbit, the crowds out here were enormous.

And the stories from that stretch are just perfect.

Landwirth was a world-class prankster. John Glenn once complained that his room didn't have enough towels. So Landwirth called a linen company, had them deliver a literal ton and a half of towels, and stacked Glenn's room so full he couldn't get the door open. At a dinner for the Mercury and early Gemini crews, he served fried cardboard cut to look like veal and hard dinner rolls dressed up as baked potatoes, just to sit back and watch them try to eat it. Astronauts got thrown in the pool after their flights. And on the very day the Holiday Inn opened, the old Starlight Lounge across the way burned to the ground. The police came and questioned Landwirth about it. He swore he had no idea how that happened.

Across A1A, the Mercury 7 put some of their Life magazine money into the Cape Colony Inn, which opened in 1962. Landwirth left the Holiday Inn to help run it. NASA was not thrilled about its astronauts owning a motel, so eventually they sold. Landwirth went on to partner with John Glenn on Holiday Inns over near Disney, and that Cape Colony spot became the La Quinta that's still standing today.

The Holiday Inn kept growing. It swallowed up the neighboring Ramada Inn and Wolfie's, added buildings in the mid-sixties and again in the late seventies, and stayed the big conference and tourist engine on the strip for decades.

The long slide

Time was not kind. By the 2000s the place had aged into the International Palms Resort and Conference Center. FelCor Lodging bought it for $22.2 million in 1998. It changed hands again around 2010, and then Driftwood Capital picked it up in October 2016 for $23 million.

By then it was rough. Between 2016 and 2019 the property racked up more than 2,100 police calls, a lot of them drug related, more than any other resort in the city. The eleven buildings, phased in from the sixties and seventies, were worn out. The stormwater situation was basically nonexistent. What had once been the beating heart of Cocoa Beach had become the problem property everybody worried about.

Driftwood spent years working with the city on height variances, zoning, and easements. Demolition of International Palms finally started in October 2023. They broke ground on the Westin in September 2024.

What's rising now

The Westin Cocoa Beach Resort and Spa is a $420 million project on that same 15.7 acres of oceanfront. 502 rooms, six stories, and the largest conference center on the whole Space Coast at more than 50,000 square feet inside plus another 70,000-plus outside. Eleven food and drink spots. A full spa. A surf wave pool along with the regular pools. Tennis, pickleball, a fitness center, retail, over 500 feet of direct beach access, and a big parking garage.

The design firm, Gensler, leaned into two things you'd only get here: NASA and our surf culture. So expect curving shapes and warm tones from the highway side all the way through to the beach.

As of the middle of 2026, the south tower has topped out, the whole thing is roughly halfway done, and they're aiming to open in 2027. Some reports say the second or third quarter, others are floating Memorial Day weekend. Driftwood Hospitality will run it. The projections are big: hundreds of jobs and a real lift for the whole area.

The whole arc, on one piece of sand

So that ground went from Ais country, to a freed-slave settlement, to Gus Edwards clearing scrub with mules, to ground zero of Mercury-era Cocoa Beach, to a tired old complex nobody wanted to talk about, and now to a Westin that's trying to put this strip back on the map.

The best part to me is this. That new resort is going up on the exact spot where the astronauts got tossed in the pool, where Cronkite's reporters worked through the night, and where Henri Landwirth buried John Glenn's room in a ton and a half of towels. You could not write a better Space Coast story if you tried.

I'll be watching those towers go up every time I drive by. Now you know what they're standing on.

See you around town, Patrick