The Entrepreneur & His Dogs. –by Anna Cooke
HOTELIER HARRIS ROSEN SPENT the first half of his life making millions. He has spent the second half giving it away. Rosen’s first job in the hospitality
industry was helping his dad finish and dis- tribute hand-lettered place cards for ban- quets at the Waldorf Astoria in New York. He was paid a penny a card, which was a fortune to a ten-year-old youngster. One day, as he walked into the elevator with his father, there stood “the most magnificent blonde lady alongside a very tall, distin- guished gentleman,” recalls Rosen. “I whispered to my dad, ‘who is that?’ Dad turned and said, ‘Ambassador Kennedy, Ms. Monroe, this is my son, Harris.’ It was Marilyn Monroe with John F. Kennedy. That sealed it for me. I thought if I could meet all of these incredible people in an elevator, this really was a business that I might enjoy.” Rosen would earn a bachelor’s degree
in hotel administration from Cornell University. He always felt like an outsider looking in while attending college. “Me at an Ivy League school. I was an aberration,” said Rosen. Having grown up in Manhattan’s
Lower East Side in the ‘40s and ‘50s, Rosen recalls stepping over people in the street on his way to school and passing homeless crowds huddled beneath the elevated train line overpass. Still, he looks back on the neighborhood with fondness, admitting that he didn’t see anything wrong with it until the day a sightseeing bus came through and he heard a passenger remark, “So this is how they live.” “My brother and I didn’t know what
she meant,” he says. “Mom had to explain to us that not everyone lives this way. And if we didn’t want to live here for the rest of our lives, we had to work hard in school and get a good education.” After college, Rosen moved to
Florida and began working for Walt Disney World. In spite of his successes with developing the Contemporary, Polynesian
82 THE NEW BARKER
and Fort Wilderness resorts, he was fired for not being a company man. “I’ve known since an early age that I’ve been inflicted with what I call that awful defective entrepreneurial gene. Deep down inside I knew that one day I was destined to be in business for myself,” said Rosen. After leaving Disney, Rosen withdrew
his last $20,000 from savings and put a down payment on a 256-room Quality Inn on Orlando’s International Drive. It
Bowery District of New York, we couldn’t afford to keep a dog,” Rosen recalls. “At one point, I even tried to adopt a neigh- bor’s dog thinking it was a stray. I named her Princess. However, a few days later, I came home from school to discover that my new found friend had an owner who had retrieved her. I was so disappointed and vowed that when I could, I would have a dog.” When Rosen purchased the Quality
Adam, Shayna, Harris Rosen, Joshua and Jack with the family dogs.
was during the gas crisis of the ‘70s and the hotel was in bankruptcy prior to Rosen’s purchase of it. Today, in that same Quality Inn, Rosen’s own office feels more like a cozy living room than what you’d expect from someone who has built the largest independently-owned hotel group in Florida. Instead of fine art on the walls, you’ll find artifacts from Rosen’s life, including photos of his family and all of their dogs. It is not unusual for one of the Rosen family dogs to visit. In fact, we met Bambie and Apple a couple of years ago while visiting with Mr. Rosen. “As a young boy, growing up in the
Inn hotel in 1974, now called the Rosen Inn International, the dream of having a dog came true. “I expanded my family to include my first pet, a German Shepherd named Rin Tin Tin, who was not only a treasured companion, but an effective hotel security guard, too. Rinny was my only family, at the time. We lived together in one of the hotel’s guest rooms for 14 years, until he passed away. He was so special to me that we buried Rinny on hotel grounds near my office. In recent years, we honored him by naming a new small meeting room at the hotel - the Rinny Room.’
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