Tall & Urban News

When the Beatles stayed in Miami Beach in 1964, they stayed at the Deauville Beach Resort on Collins Avenue, and it was their live “Ed Sullivan Show” broadcast to 70 million people from the hotel’s Napoleon Ballroom — after their debut show in New York — that helped cement the Beatles’ extraordinary popularity in the United States, and the Deauville’s status as a South Florida cultural landmark.

The hotel hosted the likes of Sammy Davis Jr., President John F. Kennedy, Frank Sinatra in its heyday. Today, the Deauville is shuttered, and soon, it is likely to be demolished, which is an unpopular opinion with preservationists.

The Deauville’s owners shut down the hotel following an electrical fire in 2017. The city of Miami Beach took them to court, hoping to force repairs. But the owners indicated they did not have enough money from insurance to do the necessary work and so little changed, even after the city started imposing fines of $5,000 a day in 2021.

This month, in January 2022, the city recommended demolition after the owners filed an engineering report that found the building to be unsafe. Attention to the structural condition of older buildings, especially ones by the ocean, has grown since the Champlain Towers South condominium collapsed last June in neighboring Surfside, killing 98 people.

For now, preservationists hope to slow down the likely demolition by asking the city to conduct its own engineering inspection. The city’s building official was granted access to the Deauville in January, 2022. 

For more on this story, go to The New York Times.