How the coronavirus ended the party at Lani Kai
By Chase Henry, Noah Clifford, Kaela Thompson, Abbey Hudson, Ross Mattia-Cooper and Brynna Stilwell
In early March 2020 in Florida, before “social distance,” before “self-quarantine,” there was spring break. Southwest Florida’s beaches were crowded with walkers and sunbathers. The restaurants and bars were full. And a group of journalism seniors at Florida Gulf Coast University went there to document spring break — at the most popular resort on Fort Myers Beach.
Fort Myers Beach in Southwest Florida is home to the iconic Lani Kai resort. It’s a pastel blue behemoth that rises five stories. 124 rooms. Four restaurants. Eight bars and lounges, a nightclub, a resort-style pool and a limo service.
People come from everywhere. Local college kids, families from the Midwest, one person, believe it or not, from Siberia and, of course, spring breakers.
I’m Brynna Stilwell. I’m a senior at Florida Gulf Coast University. Five classmates and I went to the Lani Kai on March 5 for our journalism senior capstone project. We planned on covering 24 full hours of spring break at the hotel. While, we were actually on spring break.
Our goal was to get the stories of the people who put together the experience each year. Little did we know, we were capturing the end of the party.
The Lani Kai resort was built by Robert Conidaris in 1978. Conidaris’ wife, Grace, was fond of Fort Myers Beach, so they bought some land, built a resort and began their business. Back then, the Lani Kai was an outlier on a sleepy beach. Now, it has proclaimed itself “Spring Break Central” with raucous parties and every March, dancing firefighters.
Four months before we arrived, in China’s Hubei province, a 55-year-old man contracted the coronavirus. The virus began to spread world-wide. By March 4, 2020, the United States had 158 reported cases. It hadn’t reached southwest Florida. The Lani Kai was packed with spring breakers whose biggest worry was where to get their next drink.
And our biggest worry was getting good sound.
We couldn’t hear what guests were saying. Our tape was horrible. At times, we stood in bars with about 100 people. Music, loud televisions and screaming college students filled the room. It sounded like this.
Marissa and Sabrina came here from New York and Chicago for spring break. They decided to come here after seeing a Lani Kai shirt.
“So actually back in high school, it was like, to be cool, if you were on spring break and you came back with a Lani Kai shirt, and you had the Lani Kai shirt. It was like it. You were it. You were the cool one. So we were like f*ck it lets go to Lani Kai,” they said.
Across the bar, Garrett Mueller is perched on a stage. His stage name is DJ G-Ride. Any given day, you can find him with a microphone, at a DJ mixer table. He is playing party music and keeping score for contests at the same time. His job is to keep the party going. Garrett has done this for the past nine years. For him, it’s a big part of who he is.
“This is like my family away from family. And I do. I just love to just see everybody just happy and have a good smile,” Mueller said. “You know, I’ve had so many people not just in Florida but not just in the USA just all over the country that come back just to see the show. You know, it’s amazing. You know?”
It’s a big job. In fact, it takes two teams of DJ’s. The music starts at 11a.m. and wraps at 2a.m.
There’s one DJ Garrett has never met, DJ Griff Grotti. He covers what Garrett doesn’t.
That day, Mueller hosted a cornhole tournament, a beer pong tournament, a hula hoop contest, a tug of war competition and a strong man, strong woman show. The prize? A free drink.
Spring break was in full swing. The Cincinnati firefighters just arrived. Every year, they come to the Lani Kai to, um, dance. They raise money for the ARABA Shriners charity.
Like Garrett, Lysa Gonzales works to keep the party going. She leads the housekeeping team. She started at the Lani Kai about three years ago after retiring from her job at Columbia University in New York City.
Her team cleans all of the Lani Kai’s 124 rooms. They have four hours to make sure the rooms are clean. Checkouts take the most time. And there are up to 50 of those per day. During spring break, there are more people in the rooms, which means more trash.
“We have found Champagne bottles out on the balcony. A lot of people tend to leave their clothing behind. They come with a suitcase full of stuff and leave a full, big garbage bag full of clothes,” she said. “And then of course, you know we have a few spring breakers that go the opposite direction, and they’re you know, vomiting. I don’t know if I’m allowed to say that, vomiting. We found where they’ve closed the sofa beds on us with the vomit. We found bags of trash in the A/C vents. We found a group of kids who took the dehumidifier, the bucket, and filled it with liquor.”
Our team left Lani Kai in the really early morning hours of Friday, March 6. We thought we had completed our field reporting. Spring break went on without us. The firefighters started their show on March 7. Here’s Chad, one of those firefighters.
“So, like, we’re doing our shows everything, like as normal up until that Saturday,” Chad said.
But by March 12, Florida had 51 cases of the coronavirus. The Walt Disney World Resort closed. All public schools and universities in Florida moved to remote instruction.
Then came March 17, Saint Patrick’s Day. Melissa Schneider remembers. She is the Lani Kai’s marketing director.
“The governor issued all bars and nightclubs to shut down at 5 o’clock that day until further notice – right then everything drastically changed. We still noticed people were coming to the beach and having a good time, but it certainly wasn’t as many,” Schneider said.
Garrett said the day before the shutdown order was like a normal day.
“You know, people were still out and about, you know, I was on stage. I didn’t, I took my six feet away, you know, still try to have fun with people,” he said. “However, you know, things had to happen because we wouldn’t get past this virus. You know, if nobody takes it seriously. We actually thought we had a few more days there. And then yeah, out of nowhere the next day, which was the Wednesday where they closed it down.”
The town shut down the beach. The firefighters were supposed to have 11 shows.
Here’s Chad again.
“They shut us down altogether. I guess it was causing a gathering,” he said.
Chad says his group left the beach on the morning of Friday, March 20.
“As I was packing up, I was looking out on the balcony and stuff and watching. Like, you know, see a couple stragglers on the beach and then you’d see somebody on the golf cart, like run them off. So, and they had like caution tape around the beach access points and stuff like that,” he said.
Garrett left, too. For the first time in nine years.
Soon after the Lani Kai closed down, the news broke that Conrad Buchanon, DJ Griff Grotti, died from the coronavirus. He is one of the youngest victims of the virus in Lee County, at 39 years old.
From March 9 through March 14, DJ Griff Grotti performed five shows in five days, including a performance at Lani Kai’s Club Ohana. Melissa Schneider told Naples Daily News that he performed in a plexi-glass cage in front of spring breakers. Garrett never met him.
“That is a sad situation. My heart goes out to him and his family and friends,” he said.
Garret’s DJ gig dried up.
Many of the Lani Kai’s employees have been furloughed. They are among the millions of people without work.
“Obviously it sucked because I’m the only person, you know that feeds my three kids and my wife right now in the house, you know. And so it’s definitely, definitely hard because, you know, trying, everyone’s trying to get unemployment and you know, being a DJ, obviously is taking a lot longer than you know, everyone else,” he said.
Now, the beach is empty and quiet. Fort Myers Beach blocked all hotel and vacation rentals for 90 days on March 30. On the Lani Kai website, a pop-up message now appears. It says no reservations can be made until June 26, 2020.
But, Melissa, the resort’s marketing director, says the party at the Lani Kai will be back soon.
“We’re going to go right back to how we were before. We’re already ready to go with that. We’re going to have all kinds of fun and wonderful things for our guests and patrons to come out and enjoy again. Everyone knows the Lani Kai is the big beach party on Fort Myers Beach, and we’re just ready to go. Once we can get open again, we’re ready to bring the celebration,” she said.
