Word: bahama
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...said, picked up $29,000 at the tables a few weeks ago. Former Light-Heavyweight Champ Joey Maxim was guarding the door. "Can't drink," he mumbled. "I'm watching for hustling broads and big-time gamblers." Cannes? Monte Carlo? Vegas? Not quite. Freeport, in tiny Grand Bahama Island, is not even marked on many maps. Yet Freeport boosters already call it the Riviera of the Americas, vow that in time the bustling little town will become one of the Caribbean's biggest tourist and industrial centers...
Crown Concessions. Freeport is the stubborn dream of U.S. Financier and Developer Wallace Groves. In the late 1940s, Groves bought a small lumber company on Grand Bahama, then little more than a desert island. In 1955, in exchange for tax concessions and a 99-year lease on 50,000 acres of Crown land, he agreed to dredge a harbor, build a port city - Freeport - provide school, health and utility needs, and bring in industry. But industry was not interested. All Groves had forgotten, says an associate, was "to make the place livable." So he got 100,000 more Crown acres...
...raise the needed capital, Groves set up the Grand Bahama Port Authority, Ltd.; he sold one 25% interest to a London holding company headed by British Hardware Tycoon Charles Hayward, another 25% to a New York group led by Investment Banker Charles Allen. To build the hotel and supply the other resort and residential amenities, the Port Authority organized the Grand Bahama Development Co., Ltd. with Canadian Entrepreneur Louis Chesler. The Port Authority put up $2,000,000 and 100,000 acres, Chesler $23 million. Today the $100 million pleasure isle is slowly taking shape...
Banking is only part of the boom. The main island of New Providence will soon have a new $2,800,000 Bacardi rum factory; such firms as Bethlehem Steel, Whirlpool, Owens-Illinois Glass and Outboard Marine have come in with overseas sales offices. On Grand Bahama, a $1,500,000 bunkering terminal pumps more than 1,000,000 bbl. of marine fuel a month into vessels from all over the world, while close by a subsidiary of U.S. Steel is building a $50 million cement plant. Even the cold war is pumping life into the sultry economy...
...will never support heavy industry. Says Sir Stafford Sands, 50, Minister of Finance and Tourism: "We're best off selling the product we have-the world's best climate plus easy accessibility to the world's biggest travel population." Drawing 546,000 tourists last year, the Bahamas doubled Bermuda's tourist intake, outdrew Jamaica 3 to 2, and ranked only behind Puerto Rico in total Caribbean tourist trade. Some Bahamians feel that their archipelago will soon outstrip Puerto Rico, and Sands predicts a 1,000,000-tourist year by 1971. One new lure: gambling...