The Mar Lago Beach Club stood on the south side of the Boynton Inlet. It was torn down in 1974.
INSET BELOW: The former owners, Martha and Leon Robbins.
Photos provided
By Mary Thurwachter
During World War II, hotels along the coast were called to duty. The Breakers hotel in Palm Beach served as a military hospital. Soldiers were stationed at the Boca Raton Hotel & Club. And at the defunct Seacrest Hotel in Delray Beach (the current site of the Delray Beach Marriott at Atlantic Avenue and A1A), volunteers kept watch 'round the clock from a faux bell tower while soldiers patrolled the beach by horseback.
A five-room mom-and-pop motel called Mar Lago, Latin for “sea to lake,” played an important role, too. Stationed on the south side of the Boynton Inlet, the motel and neighboring marina were located between the Atlantic Ocean and the Intracoastal Waterway. There was a cottage in back for a cook and housekeeper.
Mar Lago had been open since Leon and Martha Robbins built it in 1932. They had moved from Cleveland, Ohio, with their young sons, Bart and Lee.
During the war, the Coast Guard held quarters at Mar Lago and free accommodations were offered to spotters who used the upstairs cocktail lounge, the Mirador room, as a lookout for the U-boats sinking freighters off the coast.
Bart Robbins, a retired engineer, lived there between the ages of 9 and 23 — that is, when he wasn’t off at military school or college. He remembers spending some of his time fishing, although he said his younger brother Lee, who died 10 years ago, “was a more committed fisherman.”
His most vivid memory of the five-room motel, where rooms were named for different fish, wasn’t so much what it looked like, or the people who stayed there. Rather, it was the day his dad announced the dreadful news.
“I returned to Mar Lago for lunch on Dec. 7, 1941, and Dad told me that Pearl Harbor was attacked by the [Japanese],” Robbins, now 86 and living in Wilmington, Del., said.
As time passed, he found himself volunteering, like so many others, for the war effort.
“I was one of the spotters at the watch station at the inlet,” remembers Robbins, a University of Florida graduate who has been married to his classmate, Betty, for 63 years.
“Dad was the chief of the station — as well as the Ocean Ridge mayor for 10 years. While I was on watch, I saw three U.S. tankers torpedoed off the coast. I saw fishermen, captains of then fishing boats, sailing out to rescue the U.S. merchant sailors who survived the torpedoing.”
By then Mar Lago had already established itself as a hotspot for anglers and snowbirds alike. The motel was in the town of Boynton Beach; the seaside area where the motel stood changed its name to Ocean Ridge in 1939.
The Robbins resort was, of course, much smaller and less flashy than the 1927 Palm Beach estate with a similar name, Mar-a-Lago. Currently a private club owned by Donald Trump, that mansion was built in 1927 for Marjorie Merriweather Post.
After the war, the Mirador room was turned into a luxury apartment, making Mar Lago a six-room inn, Robbins said.
Tucker Marston of Manalapan and Gates Mills, Ohio, has fond memories of Mar Lago.
“It was wonderful and I had great times there,” he said. “I went down there many years. I would come down with my mother (Martha Robbins’ sister) and my grandfather when I was 13 or so,” Marston said. “There were no businesses on Ocean Avenue and the inlet. There was nothing there, but the fishing boats went out.”
He stayed in one of Mar Lago’s smallest rooms, facing west. “Lee and I were close friends and Lee worked on one of the fishing boats,” he said.
“I do remember a couple times seeing the wreckage of German ships coming up on the beach,” Marston said.
About 18 years ago, Marston bought a home in Manalapan near the former Mar Lago site.
“Now I live 100 yards from it,” Marston said.
Ginger Pedersen and Janet DeVries of the Boynton Beach Historical Society, researched the inn and its owners after DeVries found an old postcard of Mar Lago. They wrote about it for the Historical Society’s blog, www.boyntonhistory.org.
Leon A. Robbins, the researchers found, was born in Pennsylvania, grew up in Cuyahoga, Ohio, went to Yale, and even copyrighted a song. His occupation, according to the 1940 Ohio census, was “salesman.”
By 1955, Leon and Martha Robbins retired from the motel business, sold Mar Lago and moved to Delray Beach.
A developer had planned to tear down the motel to build a larger one, but that never happened, Robbins said. Mar Lago remained vacant until about 1974, when it was torn down to make way for Palm Beach County Inlet Park.
Martha Robbins died around 1965. Leon Robbins was 84 when he died in Delray Beach in 1984. And Mar Lago lives on as an important slice of local history.
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