A hotel where the Beatles played, torn down by its own owner
The Monticello Hotel stood near the site of the Hotel Deauville in Miami Beach, where the Beatles filmed their second Ed Sullivan Show appearance on 16 February 1964 in the Napoleon Ballroom. The Deauville, built in 1957 by architect Melvin Grossman, was demolished in an implosion on 13 November 2022 after a 2017 fire closed it for good.
The Beatles filled a ballroom for a television broadcast
Twelve hundred screaming fans packed a ballroom half a mile north of where you're standing. A television crew filmed the Beatles for their second appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. The date was February 16, 1964, just two days after they'd played Washington. The venue was the Hotel Deauville (Miami), a beachfront hotel built in the Miami Modern style in 1957. Architect Melvin Grossman designed it. Its ballroom, called the Napoleon Ballroom, briefly became one of the most-watched rooms in America.
The hotel had started decades earlier as something smaller. In 1926, a businessman named Joe Elsener built the original Deauville hotel and casino on the same stretch of oceanfront. Ten years later, in 1936, the eccentric publisher Bernarr MacFadden bought it. He put his own name on the marquee: the MacFadden-Deauville. That first building lasted until the 1950s. It was then replaced by a taller, glossier tower. John, Paul, George, and Ringo would later stand under the stage lights there.
An owner let a beachfront hotel rot, then imploded it
An electrical fire shut the Deauville down in 2017, and it never reopened. Developer Alex Meruelo was the hotel's de facto owner by then. Preservationists in Miami Beach accused him of letting the building rot on purpose. They said he wanted it to have to come down. A company tied to Meruelo was fined repeatedly by the city for code violations at the site. Local activists fought to save the building, and lost. Early in 2022, the company filed to demolish it.
On November 13, 2022, the 17-story tower was brought down in a planned implosion. The Napoleon Ballroom, where the Beatles once played to a screaming room, was the last part of the hotel left standing. It too was slated to come down. Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross floated a plan to build two new towers on the site. One would be a hotel. The other would be a luxury condo. The proposal needed the city to loosen its height limits. Voters rejected that on the ballot in November 2022, and the ground has sat empty since.
A hurricane struck the coast the year the casino opened
The Deauville's first building went up on this stretch of Collins Avenue the same year the Great Miami Hurricane tore through the coast. The storm smashed hotels. It flooded streets. It ended the land boom that had built them. Most historians say this storm pushed South Florida into depression years before the rest of the country followed. Joe Elsener's casino opened into that wreckage. It was one more beachfront gamble on ground that had just proven how fast it could take a fortune back.
A hospital ran on a dredged island for 65 years
A short boat ride from where you stand, Allison Island carried its own grand experiment. A hospital opened there in 1927. It later became part of St. Francis Hospital. It treated patients on a spit of land dredged out of Biscayne Bay just years before. It ran for 65 years before closing in 1992. By 1997 the island's old name had been retired in the official record too. It was folded into the newer designation of the barrier islands around it. The building people once traveled here for is gone. So is the name they knew it by in the paperwork.
A bowling alley became a stage for Led Zeppelin
Three-quarters of a mile north, a bowling alley called the Sunny Isles Bowling Center was torn out. Something louder took its place. Thee Image opened on March 15, 1968. It was an open ballroom with three stages and black lights. It was built for the sound the Deauville's ballroom couldn't hold. Led Zeppelin played two nights there in February 1969. Cream, the Grateful Dead and the Jeff Beck Group all took that stage in its brief run. The club lasted only a few years before it closed and was torn down. A Publix supermarket stands there now.
A collapsed condo project rose again under a new name
Steps from where you stand, the Akoya Condominium answers that. A Brazilian developer named Múcio Athayde planned it as the White Diamond. Two other towers were rising nearby to match it. Financial trouble forced him to sell in 2001. The project collapsed into bankruptcy along with its sister buildings. Homero Meruelo's company finished it as Akoya instead. It was one of the last towers Miami Beach allowed. A 1998 law capped new buildings at 200 feet. Decades later, the city loosened that same limit. A taller tower went up nearby anyway.
The ground where the Deauville stood sits empty, and the strip around it keeps building over what came before.
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.