South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
Before high-rises, Sunny Isles was famed for kitschy motels
SUNNY ISLES — When it opened on New Year’s Day in 1950, the Ocean Palm motel signaled a new era for Sunny Isles, then known mainly as home to illegal casinos.
Designed by the late and influential Miami Beach architect Norman Giller, the Ocean Palm was built to appeal to the nation’s booming fleet of motoring tourists and families — the “mo” in motel. It was notable as the country’s first two-story motel, a modern building with clean and graceful lines.
Everything that followed took a very different design direction — one that would come to define both Sunny Isles Beach and the image of Florida tourism for decades.
Motel builders and owners, eager to catch the eye of motorists puttering along a two-mile strip of A1A, conjured up a string of kitschy street-side attractions: Towering mermaids with tails wrapped around the front pillars of The Blue Mist. A spiral staircase to nowhere at The Colonial Inn. A giant plaster pelican holding a champagne bucket at The Driftwood. The concrete horses and wagon at The Desert Inn. The fiberglass sphinx in front of The Suez. The camels of The Sahara. Lots more.
“Each one wanted to have his motel stand out more than the others,” Giller told The Herald in a 1996 story about the looming demise of motel row as high-rise condos rose around and over them. “They began to try to outdo each other. I guess it was Disney World on a smaller scale.”
Sunny Isles’ signature motel row rapidly rose in the 1950s, taking shape as an affordable alternative to swanky Miami Beach. But its influences really came from a neon success springing up thousands of miles west — Las Vegas.
Consider some of the names — The Desert Inn, The Dunes, The Sahara. Designs also quickly turned exotic. Architects like Giller were responsible for part of the Sunny Isles look. He built The Thunderbird, with its exaggerated long roof line and bold sign, which still stands, as well as the whimsical, curved-glass lobby of the defunct Driftwood.
But many of the madcap ideas came from owners like Sam and Mel Rubel, who told The Herald in 1996 about the inspiration for the mermaids they called “Maids of the Mist.” It was an idea they thought of in the parking lot of a Royal Castle, long ago razed, across from the Blue Mist. They wanted something to make the place stand out. Mermaids came to them in a flash of inspiration.
Mel Rubel recalled his architect, “who shall go unnamed,” rebelling at the mermaids. “He complained we spoiled his building. He said we made it look garish.”
Perhaps. But the Maids also made it a success and influenced others along the strip. “I would like to say we knew then what we were creating, but we didn’t,” Rubel told The Herald.
The informal school of Sunny Isles design more or less culminated in The Castaways, a sprawling resort of extravagant South Seas inspiration. The famous Wreck Bar featured a pagoda-on-steroids roof. The Castaways was demolished in 1985. The Oceania highrise now occupies much of the land. By the next decade, the visitor demographics had shifted, signaling what was to come. Shops renting Russian language videos and selling Eastern European foods popped up in strip malls along A1A.
In 2022, the Thunderbird and the Sahara still stand. Most of the rest are gone, replaced by the luxury high-rises that define what is now the city of Sunny Isles Beach.
Unlike the Art Deco district in Miami Beach, there was never much enthusiasm for preserving the Sunny Isles designs.
The late Ari Millas, a University of Miami architecture professor and an expert on South Florida architectural history, told The Herald in that 1996 story that he hoped some vestiges of the era would remain.
“It’s amusing architecture. It’s an architecture of fun,” said Millas, who died in 2021. “I’d hate to see it all wiped out.”
Millas was a student when South Florida’s booming market of hotels and motels gained national attention. Scholars and critics at the time gave even high-end designs like The Fontainebleau and The Eden Roc little respect, he recalled. And Sunny Isles’ eccentricities were considered laughable, labeled, for no reason Millas could recall, “googie architecture.”
“The thinking at the time was more pristine, more orthodox,” Millas said “These had funny shapes, funny names. They were crashing all these forms together. Now, we look at it, and it’s very interesting.”
Other motel rows arose in the period but Millas knew of none as flamboyant and reflective of Florida’s tourist heritage. But even more than two decades ago, when the old motels still outnumbered the high-rises, Millas admitted difficulty in saying what was worth saving. Not all were noteworthy and as the individual motels eroded or disappeared, so did the overall impact.
Even Giller, known as “Mr. Sunny Isles” for his impact and influence, told The Herald at the time that the motels and look had run their course after nearly a half-century. The land was simply too valuable under them.
“My feeling is that everything that is old is not necessarily worth saving,” said Giller, who supported Art Deco preservation. “It is sad to see it disappear, but I think it is going to.”
It did.