President Grover Cleveland enjoyed fishing in Stuart so much during a visit in 1899 that he bought a waterfront lot just north of this site for $225 and planned a winter home there, but he died of a heart attack before it was built, and his widow later sold the property for $250; the site eventually became City Hall. Stuart's St. Lucie Hotel, a 25-room hotel built in 1913 as one of only three hotels in town, expanded three years later with an annex where the Riverwalk Stage now stands, was moved in the mid-1920s, and survives in part at the corner of St. Lucie Avenue and Seminole Street, though the main hotel was demolished in 1967. In the early 1900s, the Ashley Gang carried out bank robberies along Florida's East Coast, including the Bank of Stuart in 1915 at its original Osceola Street location and again on May 12, 1922, after the bank had moved in 1921 to the new Osceola-Fuge Building behind this site. During part of the Great Depression, Stuart had no bank until Citizens Bank opened in February 1933; it later became First National and Seacoast Bank, and the Art Deco building it built in 1939 still stands at Osceola Street and Colorado Avenue.