The Seaview Hotel is now just a hole in the ground. Real estate developers bought the iconic hotel earlier this year and a couple weeks ago began razing it to make way for a three-storey "high-end luxury condominium" project.

The Seaview Hotel was one of the oldest, if not the first, hotel ever to open it's doors on Grand Cayman. I don't know the year it opened, but it was prior to 1961. Sure it looked the part, held together more by paint and willpower than anything else, but that was the charm of the Seaview Hotel. A hotel for divers, by divers. In this day of $1,000 per night shoebox, cookie- cutter rooms at the Ritz-Carlton and "budget" accomodations at places like Comfort Suites and Sunshine Suites going for $225/night in high season and $265/night during the Christmas/New Years peak for entry-level rooms, the Seaview offered more reasonable rates like $99/night for an air conditioned room with a private bathroom. What do you really do in a hotel room besides sleep at night anyway? (OK, dumb question, but aside from THAT...)

The Seaview also had a restaurant on-site that served breakfast, lunch and dinner. In it's twilight years, it was called the Naked Fish. Started by Rick Cook (nice name for a chef, huh?) and then continued on by Neil (who's now the chef at Coconut Joe's) The Naked Fish aimed higher than just "the Seaview bar". Not to say I didn't spend many nights with one of those weird bar-top tv-trays with a big steaming bowl of shepherd's pie, but the Naked Fish was a bit classier than wings & chicken fingers & fries (which they also did quite well and were 25 cents on Thursday nights)

Rounding out the "why even leave the property?" amenities was the Seaview Dive Shop. When I first arrived here, it was an independant operation. In 1999 it was taken over and run by Bob Soto's Diving as a second shore diving location. (Besides the Lobster Pot main shore diving/operations facility that is.) When Bob Soto's Diving became Bob Soto's Reef Divers in 2001, The Seaview dive shop stayed with the old owner and became Seaview Divers. Just about that time, in November 2001, Hurricane Michelle paid a visit to Cayman and smashed down the seawall and tore up the parking lot. All that dirt, debris and chunks of asphalt the size of home plate had to go somewhere... most of it went into the dive shop. Eventually the building was deemed unsafe and the dive shop was razed and rebuilt out of reinforced concrete and a rooftop deck was built above it to add space to the restaurant area. Shortly after that, Seaview Divers was acquired by Treasure Island Divers and they operated it until Hurricane Ivan came ashore in September of 2004.

Surprisingly, considering how old the hotel was and how it was mostly wood construction, she fared quite well through Ivan. One room (the closest to the ocean) was damaged due to a broken window and water damage, two others had some water damage due to a leaking roof and the parking lot surface came up again, but the new seawall held this time. The operator of the hotel had a grand plan to get things repaired and back up and running within a few months with the help of insurance money, but suddenly a huge monkey wrench was thrown into the works. A real estate developer cast his eye on the property and decided he could turn a profit by bulldozing it flat and building condos on the land. With that, the rebuilding process stopped and the Seaview started it's slide into oblivion. That first real estate developer ended up pulling out of the deal too late to save his deposit, and too late to save the Seaview. The staff had been let go, the plans scrapped and the insurance money socked away. The Seaview then sat dormant for about 18 months slowly getting more and more dilapidated. The chewing gum, baling wire and willpower that were holding her together had been removed, and the Seaview sunk into a depression (not literally.)

When me and the other Scooterati would go for rides earlier this spring, we would head south out of town and through South Sound past the Seaview. I always went a little slower past the Seaview than I did at any other point along the ride and took a good hard look at her. The other two in the scooter gang have been here less than a year, and never knew the Seaview. They couldn't see the look on my face, since I was ahead of them, but as we drove by and you could start seeing some work being done (windows, doors, fixtures, things that could be salvaged being removed) and preparing it for demolition, it made me think back over all the years that I've been here, how many key roles the Seaview played in my life... and it made me sad.

The very first night that I arrived on the island, Ash took me to the Seaview. I met the guys I would eventually move in with the next week, at the Seaview. I had my first drunk in Cayman at the Seaview (as did John, and he hates that picture). The first girl I kissed after moving here was at the Seaview. Every Canada Day, Canadian Thanksgiving, Halloween, Christmas Dinner and New Years Eve for the next few years were at the Seaview. Every Sunday night, the entire island would go out to The Seaview. In fact, The term "Seaview Sunday" became such a catchphrase, that Hammerheads is now advertising their "Seaview Sunday" parties and offer 2-for-1 Mudslides in honor of those Sunday nights. Going away parties always started or ended at the Seaview. Birthday parties always ended up at the Seaview. Even later on, we may not have hung out at the Seaview as much as we used to, but special occasions (Halloween, New Years Eve, Canada Day & Canadian Thanksgiving) we still stuck to traditions and went to the Seaview.

I read in the paper two weeks ago or so that they had finished the salvage operation and had razed the buildings to the ground. It's been on my to-do list since then, but tonight I went down there at sunset with my camera and took a few shots of the fenced-off area that used to be The Seaview Hotel. Aside from the seawall and the flagpole, it's completey gone. If you look closely at the photos, you can see where the dive shop used to be, where the saltwater pool where thousands of people learned to scuba dive was, where the little sandy "beach" area was with the hammocks and the last standing vestige of all that the Seaview embodied: The Flagpole.

I could go on all night, but as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. Click over to my Flickr page and find the Seaview set for approximately 78,000 words.

Whenever I end up leaving here The Seaview, whatever it is then, will be one of the last places I go before heading to the airport. Just to stand there, take a deep breath of the salty air, close my eyes and remember all the crazy times that defined my pre-hurricane Ivan existence on Grand Cayman.

Update: Here's a link to the letter in the newspaper that I mentioned earlier. She gets the same message across in about 600 less words than me :)