Beatles played here, then the hotel was left to rot
Akoya, Miami, occupies ground once home to the Hotel Deauville, a curved MiMo tower where the Beatles taped their second Ed Sullivan Show appearance in the Napoleon Ballroom on February 16, 1964. The 1957 tower, designed by Melvin Grossman, was closed after a 2017 fire and imploded on November 13, 2022, after years of neglect.
Two thousand fans watched the Beatles tape Ed Sullivan here
Two thousand screaming fans packed the Napoleon Ballroom on the night of February 16, 1964, when The Beatles taped their second appearance for The Ed Sullivan Show at the Hotel Deauville (Miami), a quarter mile north on Collins Avenue. The hotel had gone up in 1957, a curved MiMo tower designed by Melvin Grossman, all glass and swagger facing the Atlantic. For one night it was the most watched building in America. Elvis Presley had stayed there. Sinatra played its rooms. The Deauville was built for exactly this kind of attention, and it got it.
A smaller resort came down to build the Deauville tower
Before Grossman's tower, there was a smaller resort on the same ground. Joe Elsener built the original hotel and casino in 1926, and in 1936 the showman Bernarr MacFadden, a physical-culture publisher who made his fortune telling Americans how to live, bought it and renamed it the MacFadden-Deauville. That older building came down to make way for the 1957 tower. Even then, the site was already being rebuilt for a bigger audience than the last one drew.
Neglect and a fire preceded the Deauville's demolition
An electrical fire closed the Deauville in 2017, and it never reopened. Alex Meruelo, the hotel's de facto owner, was accused by Miami Beach preservationists and city code officers of letting the building rot on purpose, so it could be cleared for something newer. A company tied to Meruelo was fined repeatedly for the neglect. Activists petitioned to save the tower. They lost. On November 13, 2022, the 17-story hotel was imploded in a single controlled blast. The Napoleon Ballroom, where the Beatles had played fifty-eight years earlier, was the last piece left standing, and it came down soon after.
A Spanish prince died in exile near this shoreline
The pattern of arrival and discarding was not new to this shoreline. On half a mile inland, across Indian Creek, a hospital once stood on ground built up out of the bay in the 1920s. Alfonso, Prince of Asturias died there in 1938, at 31. He had been heir to the Spanish throne until his parents' abdication and his own hemophilia disqualified him from marriage into the line. He ended up an exile in Miami, treated at a hospital on a manufactured island, and died there, a continent from the crown he never wore.
A vacant hotel tower was folded into a spa resort
Grandeur left empty is not unique to the Deauville. half a mile north, a 15-story hotel tower built in 1955 sat vacant for fifteen years, its rooms unused while the avenue kept building around it. In 2007 it was renovated and folded into a new luxury spa-and-condominium complex, its failure quietly absorbed into towers finished the following year. Nobody dynamited that one. It just waited long enough to be useful again.
A rock club hosted Zeppelin, then a supermarket replaced it
Even the venues built for the music itself didn't last. Thee Image Club opened on March 15, 1968, on the site of a demolished 32-lane bowling alley. Marshall Brevetz ran it as a three-stage ballroom with black lights and a meditation room. Led Zeppelin played there on back-to-back nights in February 1969. So did Cream, the Grateful Dead, and the Mothers of Invention. Within a few years the club closed and the building came down. A Publix supermarket sits there now.
Collins Avenue keeps rebuilding its brightest rooms, and keeps letting them go dark once the audience leaves.
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