A Special Moment in Time COLUMN
The Bathing Casinos, Part Three By Seth H. Bramson mrfec@yahoo.com
As we noted in this column over the last several weeks, early Miami Beach had a total of five bathing casinos, only one of which — the Harvey Baker Graves-owned Sunny Isles Casino — had gaming. The first of the bathing casinos was the Avery Smith and James C. Warr-owned Ocean Beach, later Smith's Casino, which was located just north of Biscayne Street on the oceanfront. Between Second and Third streets, Dan Hardie, later the Dade County sheriff, built Hardie's Casinos, which was a huge (for the times) building. North of Hardie's, at Fifth Street and the ocean, was Cook's Casino, similar to the other two but definitely smaller in size. It would be Smith's that would long outlast the other four; years after they had been closed, burned down or demolished, Cook's continued to operate until sometime in the early 1960s. Although the first three did include changing rooms and sundry shops, it appears that of the three only Smith's and Hardie's offered some form of food service; other than perhaps the selling of candies and perhaps bottled soft drinks there is no evidence that Cook's competed for the snack or meal trade. The fourth of the casinos lasted until the early 1950s but as the Everglades Cabana Club, rather than as a casino, which it had been when it was built by Carl Fisher and the Collins-Pancoast group. In fact, it started life on the block between 22nd and 23rd streets and Collins Avenue, just south of the Roney Plaza, as Fisher's St. Johns Casino, and became a true Miami Beach landmark by virtue of the large windmill that stood almost until the building was demolished in the mid-1960s to build the 22nd Street Holiday Inn, that edifice also now demolished. Perhaps the greatest glory days of the Fisher/St. Johns Casino arrived when it was bought and taken over by new operators, who changed the name to Roman Pools and made the site a major entertainment venue, with showrooms, night clubs, fine dining, a coffee shop and stores fronting both Collins Avenue and 23rd Street. The attraction enticed well-heeled patrons from both Miami Beach and the Roney Plaza, that hotel no slouch in terms of its in-house retail establishments including the first Burdine's store out of Miami proper, same operating in the Roney during the winter season only.
ABOVE: NEW CASINO AT OCEAN BEACH. MIAMI. LEFT: SWIMMERS AT SMITH'S CASINO. BELOW: THE CASINO ON MIAMI BEACH.
The Roman Pools would, as previously noted, become the Everglades Cabana Club and for some years offered swimming and diving lessons, water shows, shopping and dining mostly to locals, who enjoyed the near luxury of a cabana in the pre-Fontainebleau Hotel days, by which time some of the cabanas featured their own restrooms, sinks and separate enclosed changing areas. The northernmost of the five casinos was the Harvey Baker Graves-owned Sunny Isles Casino, built by Mr. Graves in the early 1920s as part of his development of Sunny Isles, which was to feature an entire island of recreation, private home sites, a major hotel, a fine roadway to connect Sunny Isles to the mainland (now known as 163rd Street on the Miami side, 167th Street on the beach side), a rebuilding of Sunny Isles Beach Road (today's Collins Avenue) and a water supply plant on the mainland that would eventually be taken over and operated by the City of North Miami Beach. After the "bust" of the great 1920's "boom" that occurred following the September 17 and 18, 1926, hurricane, Mr. Graves returned to Rochester, New York, and the area essentially entering a long period of quiescence. The casino building eventually housed several different restaurants, the last of them being “Grandma's Kitchen,” which no few South Floridians remember fondly. The buiding was torn down in the mid-1960s and is today the site of the Newport Motel, which opened in 1967. The memories of those great and wonderful pleasure palaces is fading fast, but the stories of the buildings and their aficianados can be found in the new Sunshine, Stone Crabs and Cheesecake: The Story of Miami Beach, published this past October by The History Press, of Charleston (www.historypress.net). Seth H. Bramson is Adjunct Professor of History at both Barry University and Florida International University. The Company Historian of the Florida East Coast Railway, he is the single most published Miami-Dade County history book author, with 12 of his 17 books dealing directly with the villages, towns, cities and people of Miami-Dade County. Bramson can be reached at mrfec@yahoo.com.
www.miamisunpost.com • The SunPost • January 14, 2010 • Page 7