The hotel that hosted the Beatles and died on purpose
The Monticello Hotel stands near the site of the Deauville Beach Resort in Miami Beach, the 1957 hotel where the Beatles played their second live Ed Sullivan Show performance on February 16, 1964, in its Napoleon Ballroom. Left to decay after a 2017 fire, the Deauville's tower was imploded on November 13, 2022, days after voters rejected a redevelopment plan.
The Beatles played the Deauville's Napoleon Ballroom live
The Beatles landed in America. Two months later, they walked onto a stage inside the Hotel Deauville (Miami). They played their second appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. The show aired live from the hotel's Napoleon Ballroom. The ballroom was built for the kind of spectacle Miami Beach was selling in the 1950s. The hotel stood a quarter mile northeast of where you are standing, on Collins Avenue near 67th Street. It opened in 1957. Architect Melvin Grossman designed it in the Miami Modern style. It had curved concrete and glass. It was meant to look like the future had arrived on the sand. For decades after, the Deauville stayed in the city's memory. People remembered it as the place where a British band changed what an American television audience expected pop music to look like.
The Deauville decayed, then was imploded on purpose
An electrical fire shut the Deauville down in 2017. It never reopened. Alex Meruelo was the businessman who controlled the hotel through a limited liability company. He was accused of letting the building rot instead of repairing it. The company was fined more than once by the City of Miami Beach for the condition it was left in. Local preservationists tried to stop what was coming. They lost. Stephen M. Ross is the owner of the Miami Dolphins. He wanted to buy the site. He wanted to build two towers. One would be a hotel and one would be a condominium. The plan needed the city to waive its height limits. Miami Beach voters rejected that ballot measure on November 8, 2022. Five days later, on November 13, 2022, crews imploded the Deauville's 17-story tower. The Napoleon Ballroom, where the Beatles had played, was the last piece left standing. It came down soon after. What replaces the site was still undecided when the dust settled.
A hurricane drowned the newly built beach strip
Eleven feet of storm surge came ashore before dawn. It drowned the strip that Miami Beach had just finished building. The Great Miami Hurricane killed an estimated 113 people on the peninsula and the land around it. Winds passed 150 miles an hour. Two thousand homes were destroyed. Three thousand more were damaged. The barrier island had been sold as paradise for barely a decade. That morning it showed what the sand under all of it could still do.
A diamond-crowned tower rose without its diamond
A tower of curved diamond glass was supposed to rise where the Akoya Condominium now stands. Brazilian developer Múcio Athayde planned three towers along Collins Avenue. Each was capped with a diamond-shaped roof. Financial trouble forced him to sell the project in 2001, before it was finished. Developer Homero Meruelo's company bought it and completed it without the diamond crown. They renamed it after a pearl oyster instead. It went up as one of the last really tall buildings Miami Beach would allow. A 1998 height law closed the door behind it. Everything that came after had to stay under 200 feet.
A former bowling alley became a rock club
A former bowling alley eight blocks north became Thee Image Club in March 1968. It was a rock venue with three stages and black lights. Cream and the Grateful Dead played there. Led Zeppelin played twice, on consecutive nights in February 1969. The Doors were booked but moved to a bigger hall instead. The club lasted only a few years before it closed. The building came down. A Publix supermarket stands on the site now.
An empty hotel was gutted, kept, and reopened
A 1955 hotel tower stood empty for fifteen years. It was a vacant hulk on Collins Avenue near 68th Street. In 2007 it was renovated and reopened as part of Canyon Ranch Miami Beach. This wellness resort was built around the old building rather than in place of it. A new south tower opened in 2008, twenty stories tall. A taller north tower went up the same year. It reached 37 floors. The old hotel kept its shape inside the new complex. It still stood where it always had.
The Deauville came down instead of being saved. This tower, a half mile north, was gutted and kept.
Collins Avenue still runs past a beach where one hotel was blown apart and its neighbors were rebuilt around.
Every person, building and event in this story opens into its own dig in the app — and it will dig the ground you are standing on instead, wherever that is.