Miami Beach police take billy goat into custody

from the Miami Daily News, Mar. 4, 1938

The McAllister Hotel was Miami's first high-rise hotel

Miami Daily Metropolis, Jan. 18, 1920.

______

THE MCALLISTER WAS CITY'S FIRST HIGH-RISE HOTEL

Miami Herald
December 3, 1987

The McAllister Hotel sits empty, windows broken out, hallways still, lobby bustle-less, ghosts its only guests.

What was Miami's first high-rise hotel and once the city's largest is reduced to waiting for a raze in a paint job that manages to combine the color brown with those of bottled Thousand Island and French dressings.

It wasn't always so.

In 1912, Emma Cornelia Hatchett McAllister, a wealthy widow from Fort Gaines, Ga., bought a half-block of bay-front property at Flagler Street and Bayshore Drive.

It was not until 1926 that Bayshore would be renamed Biscayne Boulevard, bay bottom sand would be sucked up to fill in Bayfront Park, and the corner would find itself as the central intersection of downtown Miami.

The widow decided to build a hotel there in 1915. Royal Palm Park was across the street to the south. A three-story, clapboard home was to the north. The Elks Club was just down Flagler to the west. And to the east was Elser Pier, sandy beach and the lapping waters of Biscayne Bay.

Concrete was poured in 1917. By 1919 seven stories were up when the widow McAllister ran out of money.

New owners arrived and the show went on, and in 1920 , during the post-World War I boomlet, the hotel, named for madam founder, opened its first of three wings for the winter season. It was spectacular.

The ground floor contained street-level shops with striped awnings. Second and third floors were shaded porches where guests could sit in rockers and take in the breeze off the bay. Potted palms, tile floors.

Later, the new hotel was so popular that it had a problem keeping towels. Guests liked to steal them, using towels to cushion bottles of bootleg liquor, readily available in Prohibition Miami after being smuggled in from Cuba and the Bahamas. Management began offering corrugated cardboard for guests with a taste for wrapping.

In its heyday, the hotel used 4,800 towels one month and spent $15,000 a year to replace soap in rooms. A third wing was finished in 1925. Finished, the McAllister had 10 floors, 550 rooms. For the 1927-28 season, advertised guaranteed rates were $6, $8 and $10 for a single and $8 and up for a double. European plan, meals not included.

City leaders decided they wanted a boulevard named Biscayne in front of the McAllister . They proposed filling in the beach front, creating a park. The hotel 's owners were not amused. They fought the idea.

The city promised to outlaw buildings on the park side of the street. Eventually, the hotel gave in. Its frontage, just 50 feet from the beach, was gone. It was suddenly moving inland. By 1926, its fortunes were moving in decline.

The park was built, and in 1933 Franklin D. Roosevelt was set to make a speech there, joined by Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak. McAllister porches were jammed with people who witnessed the near assassination of the president-elect and the death of the mayor.

During World War II, the Navy took over, using the hotel as a billet for enlisted men. There went the neighborhood from 1942 to 1945.

Undated photo of the McAllister Hotel under construction.
(Note notations in margins)
Click here to enlarge.

Aerial view of downtown Miami with new
McAllister Hotel. (1920)

Miami Daily Metropolis, Jan. 10, 1920.

Miami Daily Metropolis, Dec. 30, 1920.

1923.

McAllister Hotel with cars parked on sand. (1925)
Click here to enlarge.

1926.

Looking west on Flagler Street. McAllister Hotel is
in center of photo. (1931)

Morris Lapidus: 'I wanted people to walk in and drop dead'

Video by VideoSOLUTIONSMedia


Via the New York Times:

No American architect in the 20th century embraced more flamboyantly the flagrantly commercial aspect of design than did Morris Lapidus, who titled his autobiography "Too Much Is Never Enough."

Lapidus (pronounced LAP-i-dus), who died at age 98 in 2001, was long derided but later praised for designing some of South Florida's gaudiest, glitziest and most glamorous hotels — including the Fontainebleau, the Americana and the Eden Roc — in the 1950s and 1960s.

His style was mockingly called Miami Beach French, and critics scorned the ''obscene panache'' with which he created what they called his palaces of kitsch, many of which have been razed or remodeled. But as Miami Beach underwent a renaissance, becoming a trendy place for the jet set, the critical winds blew in his direction. After being shunned by architecture critics and architects for much of his long career, he and his work are now referred to with respect by a new generation of writers and postmodernist architects — among them Rem Koolhaas and Philippe Starck. He had been, several critics decided, ''a postmodernist long before the term existed.''

Lapidus was steeped in classical architecture, but he created an eye-catching mixture of French Provincial and Italian Renaissance — with whiplash-curve facades and a splashy use of color — and he lavished ornament upon ornament. His most famous work was the Fontainebleau, built in 1954. Its interiors combined 27 colors. It had what was called a staircase to nowhere that actually led to a modest cloakroom, so that dinner guests could leave their coats and parade down in their sparkling jewelry and decolletage to the delighted stares of the crowds in the hotel's lobby. The hotel was once called ''the nation's grossest national product.'' But Lapidus dismissed all critical jibes. He proudly referred to the Fontainebleau as ''the world's most pretentious hotel.''

Architectural understatement was not his style. He put live alligators in a terrarium in the lobby of the Americana, he said, so that guests would ''know they were in Florida.''

''I wanted people to walk in and drop dead,'' he said of his celebrated hotel lobbies. His work, he said, ''set new standards, and a lot of old-line critics didn't agree with me.'' By the 1980s, though, he said, that had changed, ''because everyone is doing the unusual now.''

_________

Curbed Miami: Old Photos Show the Fontainebleau Like the Stage Set it Was

Miami Archives: From Millionaires' Row to Hotel Row

Beepers and pay phones in Casablanca

While doing some research recently, I stumbled upon one of my favorite Miami Herald Tropic magazine articles from 25 years ago. (Remember Tropic magazine?)

"Welcome to Casablanca" by John Dorschner, ran on Sunday, June 15, 1986.

In the piece, written five years after the infamous Time magazine "Paradise Lost" cover story and 3 years after "Scarface" came to town, Dorschner attempted to show how 80's Miami had become, for some, a modern day Casablanca. However, in this remake, Crockett and Tubbs and more than a few Colombian drug dealers, replaced Bogart and Bergman.

Look at us now. Awash in crime, still. Aswarm with immigrants. Aboil with fear. And we are . . . Casablanca. They call it exotic intrigue. Romance. Multicultural excitement. This town has become a movie. Or more precisely: a TV show.

You can trace the image back four years, to the time that a television producer named Tony Yerkovich visited Miami. Yerkovich traveled around the town with undercover agents and visited nightspots with "guys on the other side of the law." He heard about dope dealers, gun smugglers, "propagandists for foreign governments," corrupt bank officials, exiled dictators and intelligence agents. Miami, he concluded, was "a modern-day American Casablanca."

Miami-Casablanca : The idea had been floating around since the '60s, mostly cropping up in minor magazine pieces, but Yerkovich was able to convert his vision into truly pop culture. His Miami Vice had banal dialogue and trite plots, but the show achieved a certain look, a feel. Suddenly the show was "hot."

Hordes of out-of-town journalists -- from the London Mail, Sacramento Bee, Paris Match, Dayton Daily News -- have been descending upon Miami, intent upon finding the . . . real story. "There had to be a hundred people doing 'the real Miami Vice,' " says Billy Yout, spokesman for the Miami office of the
Drug Enforcement Administration, who was interviewed by most of them.

When a Norwegian newsman suddenly showed up and asked an undercover Metro agent if he could follow him around for a day, the agent asked if Norway was about to start broadcasting Miami Vice. Yes, said the newsman, how did you know?

One of the problems Miami faced 25 years ago was a flourishing drug trade.

Back then, if you knew what to look for, the drug dealers weren't all that hard to spot. They did everything except wear uniforms with name tags.

But the tools of their trade - beepers and pay phones - seem downright quaint today. In some circles, just wearing a beeper meant you might be a drug dealer. (In the 1986 trial of "Miami River cop" Armando Estrada, another officer testified that he had seen Estrada "wearing a beeper.")

In one section of his 1986 Tropic story, Dorschner painted a fascinating picture of the stereotypical 80's drug dealer and drug deal. It's safe to say this is not how drug deals are conducted today.

THE COIN DROPPERS

It's quite easy to see a drug deal happening in South Florida. They're going on all around you, especially if you live in the southern suburbs. All you have to do is know what to look for.

Many dopers still deck themselves out in gold, with the Rolex watch and the Porsche convertible. But others, realizing the stereotypes, are toning themselves down when they go out working.

"Colombians are not overdressed," says Detective Marty Heckman, who -- like Belker on Hill Street Blues -- spends much of his time "hanging out," usually in Kendall shopping centers. "They're suave but not flashy. They like color-coordinated clothes -- if they have gray slacks, they'll have gray shoes. They're all like 5-8, 145-150 . . . beeper on the hip. And they linger by the pay phones, with expensive little black books with all sorts of codified numbers."

The beeper -- usually the digital-readout kind -- is their tool of the trade, such a giveaway that some dopers have started hiding theirs in ankle holsters.

Dope deals are always fluid, perhaps a dozen conversations and meetings, none of which lasts more than five minutes. Doper one beeps doper two to call him at a pay phone. Doper two does so, from another pay phone. Beeper to beeper, pay phone to pay phone, calls virtually impossible to trace. "Coin droppers," detectives like Heckman call them. Men who spend their days hanging around pay phones, usually in Kendall, because that's where most dopers live, and because they often are carrying considerable amounts of cash and they feel more certain they won't run into a random mugger in staid Kendall.

"Miller Square used to be a mecca for them," says Detective Heckman. "At 137th and Miller. But then the uniformed officers started hanging out there in the green and whites, and 'they scared the fish from the bay.' "

Billy Yout at DEA says dopers also like the bank of pay phones beside the Winn-Dixie in the Midway Mall center. Sometimes agents have seen dopers three deep at the phones, waiting for an available line. Dadeland is popular, and the Falls, and gas-station/convenience stores -- any pay phone where there is a large field of view, so that the dopers can check to see if they're being observed.

If you want to spend a little time, you can watch a deal taking place, or at least part of the negotiations. Look for luxury cars -- say, a Mercedes -- parked beside a Kendall pay phone. Or a rental car (rental cars have license-plate numbers beginning with Z), because there's a trend for dopers to seek the anonymity of a bland Oldsmobile rental.

What you see would go something like this scene, witnessed by a journalist on a weekday afternoon:

On Southwest 117th Avenue, a little north of Sunset Drive, a two-tone Lincoln was parked in front of a Farm Store. At a pay phone, a man was dressed casually, in black boots, nondesigner jeans, a loose-fitting Hawaiian shirt. He was wearing a subdued gold-and-steel watch that appeared to be a $1,500 Concord model. He was chatting in a slow, dignified Spanish, using the formal "usted" manner of address.

When the journalist approached and picked up the adjoining pay phone, the man spoke quickly and hung up. A minute later, a beige Mercedes appeared. The Lincoln man walked over and slid into the passenger seat in front.

The Mercedes drove across the street. Three minutes later, it was back, and Mr. Lincoln climbed out, said goodbye to Mr. Mercedes and drove off in his own car.

The "meet" was over.

"That's a perfect profile of a narcotics meet," said Metro narcotics specialist Reddington, when told of the meeting. "That is so common, around any shopping mall in Dade County. More so in the southwest, but it happens all over. . . . It doesn't take a sixth grade education to see that he's not playing the stock market."

Who was Richard E. Gerstein and why is his name on the courthouse?

Richard E. Gerstein, Jan., 1966.

Most people simply call it "the courthouse."

Its official name is the Richard E. Gerstein Justice Building.

Constructed at a cost of $8.5 million; when it opened in 1962 it was known as the Metro Justice Building. 

Gerstein campaign ad,
Miami News, Sept. 4, 1972.
(Click to enlarge)

In 1992 it was renamed to honor the late Richard E. Gerstein; Dade County's 6-term State Attorney who held office from 1956 to 1977.

The Miami Herald once called Gerstein, "the most powerful, controversial, durable and well-known politician in Dade County."

However, it's safe to say a majority of the people who pass through the doors of the REGJB each day probably couldn't tell you who Gerstein was if their life depended on it.

What follows, are a few glimpses into the life and career of Gerstein, told with clippings from the Miami News.

______________

Miami News, Oct. 19, 1957.

Miami News, May 4, 1962.

Miami News, Feb. 26, 1964.

Click to enlarge.

______________

Miami News, July 15, 1964.

Miami News, Aug. 24, 1972.

Sept. 1, 1972. (AP)

________________

EX-PROSECUTOR RICHARD GERSTEIN DIES

Miami Herald, April 27, 1992

Former Dade State Attorney Richard Gerstein, a larger-than- life figure in Dade County politics for more than 20 years and one of Florida's most colorful and influential prosecutors, died of an apparent heart attack early Sunday. He was 68.

The towering, imposing prosecutor gained national prominence in 1973 by winning the first conviction in the Watergate scandal that would eventually force the resignation of President Richard Nixon. Gerstein's conviction of Bernard Barker on money-laundering charges in Miami linked the White House directly with the 1972 burglary at the Democratic Party's headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C.

And as a lawyer in private practice last year, Gerstein briefly saw the spotlight again while representing comedian Paul Reubens -- television's "Pee-wee Herman" -- against public indecency charges in Sarasota.

[...]


Gerstein's often stormy career in the state attorney's office spanned much of the turbulent 1960s and '70s and was marked by highly publicized battles against South Florida mobsters, gamblers and corrupt politicians, as well as his own crusades against what he viewed as vice, pornography and perversion.

"This thing gets in your blood," he told an interviewer in 1967. "The excitement of something new each day, the challenge of holding so large an office together. Call it ego if you like, but it's exciting."

Gerstein's political legacy includes a long line of former assistants who, after gaining visibility and experience under him, went on to successful careers of their own in politics and the law. The list includes incumbent State Attorney Janet Reno, whom Gerstein hand-picked as his successor when he stepped down in 1977, as well as Miami Beach Mayor Seymour Gelber, Florida Supreme Court Justice Gerald Kogan, Dade Chief Judge Leonard Rivkind and the late U.S. District Judge Eugene Spellman.

"I still feel his influence today," Reno said. "How would he do this? What would Gerstein do? What would he think?"

Gelber, who served as Gerstein's administrative assistant through the late 1950s and into the 1960s before becoming a circuit judge, said Gerstein pioneered many of the administrative and prosecutorial methods that are standard practice today.

"He was part of the transition of Miami from an old sleepy city into a modern government," Gelber said. Richard Earle Gerstein was born in Pittsburgh on Sept. 5, 1923, and spent many of his childhood winters on Miami Beach before enrolling at the University of Miami. He enlisted in the Army Air Corps in 1942 and, on his 21st birthday over Ludwigshaven, Germany, Gerstein's plane was hit by flak and he was struck in the face. Half-blind and unable to speak, according to the citation he would later receive, Gerstein guided other crewmen back to the allied side with hand signals. For his valor he received a Distinguished Flying Cross and a Purple Heart.

At the end of the war, Gerstein returned to UM and earned undergraduate and law degrees. He also threw himself into politics. He became president of Dade's Young Democrats and fashioned friendships that would serve him well in 1956 when, at the age of 33, he defeated the incumbent prosecutor. When Gerstein was sworn in, the entire office staff included 55 people. When he announced his resignation in 1977, it had grown to 310, including 100 prosecutors lawyers and a staff of investigators.

Throughout his tenure, Gerstein proved more than adept at grabbing headlines, not always for the better. At six-feet-five, 215 pounds and nearly bald, he struck a commanding physical presence in the courtroom. He had a habit of staring balefully at defendants with his single good eye and a manner that made him seem personally affronted by every crime.

In addition to playing tough with murderers and rapists -- Gerstein boasted of a 90 percent conviction rate and on the number of killers he helped send to the electric chair -- he fought with mixed success to clean up such rackets as greyhound race-fixing, bookmaking, bolita, prostitution and back-alley abortions.

He successfully went after Miami Beach and Dade County politicians who pocketed money from zoning and other deals, jailed "ambulance-chasing" lawyers and spent years trying to convict Dade Sheriff Tal Buchanan, who was suspected of protecting racketeers in the early 1960s.

Largely through Gerstein's efforts, the state of Florida took over the licensing and regulation of pari-mutuel wagering, a step that went a long way in eliminating organized crime influence.

But in his early years he also undertook other crusades that, in retrospect, made him appear almost prudish.

During his first decade in office, Gerstein waged constant battle against what he viewed as pornography. He tried repeatedly to shut down adult movie theaters and he personally purchased nudist magazines in attempts to bring cases against magazine shop owners.

In perhaps his most publicized case, he prosecuted the owner of Whelan's Drug Store in Miami Beach for selling a copy of Henry Miller's acclaimed novel Tropic of Cancer for 95 cents. "Clearly obscene and pornographic," Gerstein called it.

He failed to win a conviction. Yet he insisted he opposed censorship. "We've acted only on complaints about straight garbage. Junk that no one even pretends has any literary merit," he said then.

In the early 1960s, Gerstein targeted homosexuals after a national magazine listed Miami as one of six U.S. cities favored by them. In addition to developing lists of people suspected of being what he called "perverts," Gerstein defended his crusade, saying that homosexuality "inevitably leads to serious criminal activity, including blackmail and extortion based on knowledge of the deviate's actions."

At one point, Gerstein went after shop owners who sold cigarettes to youths under age 15. And after the famous 1965 fight in which the young Cassius Clay -- who later changed his name to Muhammad Ali -- beat Sonny Liston for boxing's heavyweight crown, he opened an investigation, apparently unsatisfied that Liston really had torn a ligament in his right shoulder that forced him to throw in the towel.

Magic City Tourist Camp in Lemon City - 1934

The Magic City Tourist Camp in Lemon City, 1934.

1934. (Click all images to enlarge.)

From Florida Memory:

Tin Can Tourism

The opening of highways to southern states during the second decade of the twentieth century allowed newly mobile northerners and adventurous men and women from around the nation to see the unique sites and communities of Florida's interior, away from the more developed cities and destinations on the east and west coasts. After the completion of the Dixie Highway from Montreal to Miami in 1915, the number of automobile tourists increased dramatically every year, and Florida's rural areas and small towns began to change as well.

Today - 6005 NE 2nd Ave.

Today - One of the remaining cottages.

(Click here for related article.)


View Larger Map

Happy 4th of July from Miami Archives

Miami Archives proudly presents a few tips on how to enjoy a safe, sane and fun Fourth...with some assistance from the July 3, 1913 issue of the Miami Daily Metropolis:

The ordinance prohibiting the sale and use of
fire crackers and explosives of any
kind is in full force and effect.

Be sure to have plenty of Coca-Cola on hand 
"when company calls."

And, what's a 4th of July celebration without Seybold's [ice] cream?

Don't forget the Kodak!

But, if all that sounds like too much excitement,
just relax on your own porch and crank up
the Victrola. 

Dade County Courthouse under construction

Construction begins on Dade County Courthouse, 1925.
(Old courthouse can be seen through ironwork.)

1927.

1927.

Dade County Courthouse opens. From the Miami Daily News,
Sept. 6, 1928.

Miami Daily News, Jan 1, 1928: New Courthouse to be finished about June 15