Kenann Building and its Chateau Madrid: singular in architecture and nightlife memories

See photo below for changes to this corner

By Jane Feehan

Fort Lauderdale's Kenann Building, the cylindrical landmark structure at the northwest corner of Federal Highway and Oakland Park Boulevard was completed in 1964. Builder and realtor Kenneth G. Burnstein entertained an idea for such a structure long before it was set to blueprints by architect F. Louis Wolff.*

Historically, builders shied away from round structures because they were thought to be more expensive to construct, restricted usable space, and were tough to get loans for.  Burnstein, 32 years-old at the time, admitted it took longer than usual to land a loan for the eight-story office building but he was successful in obtaining one in New York.

Ground was broken for the building, named for Burnstein and his wife Ann, on Nov. 22, 1963, the day President Kennedy was assassinated. Seven stories were dedicated to 1,000 square-foot offices. Each floor had its own air conditioning unit.  Burnstein claimed the structure offered 30 percent more usable space than did conventional construction.

When completed, the building featured a circular entrance of reinforced concrete that tapered vertically to a singular round pylon, similar to that used by Frank Lloyd Wright in his design of the Johnson Wax headquarters built in 1940. The lobby included two cypress trees four-stories tall, and a large pool with waterfalls, plants and fish.

Construction also included a colorful, external 60-foot vertical mosaic, a South Florida design element popular in the 1960s and 70s. According to Tropical Magazine (Oct. 2012), the mosaic, with images of swordfish, ocean waves, and tropical palms, holds the distinction of being the “best mid-century mosaic from Fort Lauderdale to Miami.”

Other than for its design, the Kenann Building evokes memories among many for its eighth floor nightclub and dining venue, Chateau Madrid. For 20 years the night spot, opened by John and Diane Bachan, was the place to go for top-tier entertainment including Rosemary Clooney, Buddy Greco, Tony Martin, and Louis Armstrong. Armstrong played there for one week in 1966, including New Year’s Eve. Revelers could have dinner and be entertained by Armstrong for $25 per person.  (Trivia: the club was also managed by Philip Zaslavsky, once manager of Wolfie’s on Sunrise Boulevard and later part owner of Durty Nelly’s. He died in 1991.)

Fortune changed for Burnstein, who first came to Fort Lauderdale from Mobile, AL in 1957. He became the target of several investigations. The realtor reportedly died in a plane crash in 1976. According to legend, only his severed finger was found.

After Burnstein’s death, the Kenann Building slid into disrepair; tenants left. In 1991, investors purchased the property for $1.3 million. Architect Dan Duckham redesigned the landmark and included a second level attachment that resembles a satellite that has since been occupied by various restaurants and nightclubs.

The Kenann Building, with its colorful past and blend of Wolff and Duckham architectural features, still holds a special place in Fort Lauderdale's past—and its present. Copyright © 2014. All rights reserved. Jane Feehan.

* F. Louis Wolff and wife Jean established an endowed scholarship for the School of Architecture at Florida Atlantic University in 2002.

KenAnn Building 9/2023; it no longer dominates
the Oakland Park, Federal Highway corner

 Sources:

Miami News, June 28, 1964

Miami News, Dec. 27, 1966

Miami News, Oct. 11, 1991

Tropic Magazine, Oct., 2012

 Tags: Fort Lauderdale history, Chateau Madrid, Fort Lauderdale architects, film researcher, architects

Fort Lauderdale in the news - 1964

Kenann Building

By Jane Feehan

Below are Fort Lauderdale news tidbits from 1964 ...

Sky Harbor East  -The first high-rise condominium in southeast Fort Lauderdale opens adjacent to Port Everglades. The second co-op building, Breakwater Towers, opens nearby.

Jim Bouton, a New York Yankee, signs a contract for $18,000 in Fort Lauderdale  March 12 after being threatened with a $100-a-day-fine. He was the league’s first contract holdout in 25 years. Bouton had the league’s best earned-run average that year. He had demanded $20,000, a 100 percent increase in salary over the prior year. Mickey Mantle signed a $100,000 in 1964.

Kenann Building – Ken Burnstine opens the seven-story round building designed by architect Louis Wolff. Named for Ken and wife Ann, the Kenann Building remains a landmark at the corner of Oakland Park Boulevard and Federal Highway.

Hurricane Cleo, Aug. 26 – The storm moves north from Miami and hits Fort Lauderdale as a Category 2 hurricane. It was the only day the Fort Lauderdale News was not published.

Hugh Taylor Birch State Park – More people (about 500,000) visited this Florida park than any other in the state in 1964.

Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater – The Fort Lauderdale News endorses the senator for president of the United States.

Commercial Boulevard Bridge – After protest by some in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, the $1 million bridge opens Oct. 16.

Brian Piccolo –Fort Lauderdale resident and Wake Forest football team full back named by the Associated Press as back of the week. Piccolo was 20 years old.

College Students – More than 15,000 students spend spring  break on Fort Lauderdale’s beach. (This number seems low for those who were there).

Tags: Fort Lauderdale in the 1960s, Florida historical researcher, film researcher, Fort Lauderdale history, Florida sports history

Luxury, kitsch and convenience - Sunny Isles motels of the 1950s and ...

Thunderbird Motel circa 1960
Florida State Archives

By Jane Feehan

Motels played a key part in Florida’s tourism industry during the 1950s and 60s.  In 1946, the Florida Hotel and Motel Association reported there were only 1,311 in the entire state. But by 1955, the organization tallied 5,085 motels along Florida’s highways and beaches. A motel was defined as a place  a car could be parked in front of one’s room. That definition was modified over the years but it translated into cheaper accommodations than those offered by hotels.

Sunny Isles today

Miami area motels appealed to families seeking an alternative to expensive hotels along Miami Beach. Motels competed with the glitz of the Fontainebleau, the Eden Roc and other hotels.

Rates were kind to a family’s purse. A comfortable room at a glamorous Sunny Isles motel fetched $18-28 a day during the winter season, about half of what a Miami Beach hotel charged. The same rooms would sell for $10-16 a day during summer months. (Fort Lauderdale room rates ran as low as $6 during the summer but motels had fewer amenities.)

Nowhere were motels as splashy as those built in Sunny Isles (near 170th Street, the Fontainebleau is close to 40th Street).

Luxury, kitsch, and convenience reigned during the 1950s and 60s. Curbside check-in made it possible to register without leaving the car at some motels. Others offered supper clubs, beach cabanas, dance floors, children's programs and upscale restaurants with down-scaled attire; coats and ties were not required. The Sahara Motel posted two stuffed camels and a figure of a desert nomad at the entrance. Others touted elaborate interior waterfalls and kitschy architectural design. 

Not only were they flashy, motels were large.

Sun City, with 476 rooms, claimed to be the largest in 1955. The Castaways*, built about 1951, opened with 172 rooms (in 1958 it expanded to 300 rooms and eventually to 540 in the next decade). The Dunes built an indoor skating rink and a 350-seat convention room.

  

Motels in the U.S. declined in popularity with the advent of the super highway, highway interchanges  and lodging chains. In Sunny Isles, motel bookings decreased as resorts in other locales competed for tourist dollars. Land values went sky high and so did taxes.

By the 1970s, the Castaways Motel attracted  few families. By then, the motel was better known for its famous Wreck Bar and night life than for its family accommodations. Owner Joe Hart sold the motel in the 1970s; today the site is home to the Oceania Condominiums. The Dunes was replaced by a condominium; the Sunny Isles of the 1960s is now a wall of condominiums, barely more than a  memory of the motel heydays of the 1950s and 60s.

*Architect Tony Sherman designed the early Castaways; Charles McKirahan designed the expansion in 1958. The Wreck Bar at the Castaways drew celebrities, including Lenny Bruce and, in 1964, the Beatles after they finished playing on the Ed Sullivan Show at the Deauville Hotel.

__________

Sources:

New York Times, Dec. 11, 1955.

Armbruster, Ann.  The Life and Times of Miami Beach. New York: Alford A. Knopf, Inc. (1995).

Tags: Miami history, Sunny Isles history

The big cool down hikes up tourism in Miami Beach

           Ultra Modern Hotels - Miami Beach 1948  Florida State Archives

By Jane Feehan

Air-conditioning, invented by Dr. John Gorrie* of Apalachicola, FL during the 1850s, made its debut in Miami during the 1930s when Hill York Company was founded by Ron Nitzsche and Everett Carroll. Six such companies were listed in the telephone directory by the end of that decade.

Hill York claims their first system was sold to the Roney Plaza Hotel (no year mentioned). The Albion Hotel in 1939 boasted an air-conditioned dining room in its ads. The Leamington and Liberty hotels in 1946 advertised as being fully air-conditioned (not central). Howard Kleinberg, Miami Beach historian and Miami News reporter, wrote that the Martinique Hotel, opened in 1946 at 6423 Collins Avenue, was the first centrally cooled hotel.

Martinique Hotel under construction 1946
Florida State Archives

The 12-story Martinique (today the site of the Mar del Plata condominium) was designed by Roy France, later noted as one of Miami Beach’s Art Deco architects. The $2 million hotel, with 134 rooms, advertised as being centrally and fully air-conditioned. The 160-room Kenilworth Hotel opened its doors later the same year and was also centrally air-cooled.

Whatever hotel was really first, by 1955 nearly all major hotels in Miami Beach were fully and centrally air-conditioned, attracting more visitors. During the mid-1950s to the early 1960s, Miami Beach was one of the most popular resort cities in the U.S., thanks, in part, to air-conditioning. The technology extended the winter tourist season well into summer. It was also a factor in Florida's explosive growth during the 1950s.

Hill York Company moved its headquarters to Fort Lauderdale but maintains a branch office in Miami. 

Copyright © 2013. All rights reserved. Jane Feehan.

________________ 

* Dr. Gorrie (1803-1855), born on the island of Nevis, moved to Florida where he treated and studied tropical diseases. He thought bad air led to the spread of disease. He put ice in basins and suspended them from ceilings to cool the air. Gorrie stopped practicing medicine to develop a form of refrigeration but died in near obscurity. The idea of air-conditioning lay dormant for 50 years. Apalachicola hosts the John Gorrie Museum.

Wax freize of Gorrie demonstrating
his invention 1899. Fl State Archives

Kleinberg, Howard. Miami Beach: A History. Miami: Centennial Press (1994).

Kleinberg, Howard. Woggles and Cheese Holes. Miami: The Greater Miami & The Beaches Hotel Association (2005).

Palm Beach Post, Oct. 27, 1946.

Hill York

Wikipedia

Tags: Miami Beach history, history of air-conditioning, Miami Beach hotel history, tourism history, Martinique Hotel, Kenilworth Hotel, Albion Hotel, historical research, film researcher, architects

Gran Casino Nacional - "Monte Carlo of the Western Hemisphere," run by mobsters - for awhile

Photo by nurzumspass,
CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>,
via Wikimedia Commons

Gran Casino Nacional 

Hotel Nacional de Cuba

www.hotelnacionaldecuba.com

  

By Jane Feehan

There’s a scene in Godfather II depicting a meeting of  underworld characters at a Havana hotel during the late 1940s. It was a re-enactment of a summit held at the Hotel Nacional attended by mobsters Meyer Lansky*, Lucky Luciano, Santo Trafficante, Jr., Frank Costello and others. They came to discuss, among other mob interests, expansion of  their gambling world. Trafficante ran the hotel’s famous casino, Gran Casino Nacional. The law (if not politicians) was making it difficult to run gambling houses in South Florida. Cuba was a ripe opportunity.*

They had a lot to work with at the Havana hotel. It had an elegant reputation, drawing the upper crust from all over the world.  Designed and built in 14 months by two American companies, McKim, Mead and White (architects), and Purdy and Henderson Co., Hotel Nacional opened in December 1930 to wide acclaim. Its Hispanic-Moorish architecture with Art Deco accents provided an elegant setting that drew the rich and famous for years before it caught the attention of Lansky and friends.

The Miami News ran a story (Jan. 17, 1932) extolling the hotel’s guest list and sumptuous opening festivities of its third season.  “Havana has an attraction to offer the tourist which no resort in the United States can offer – a casino,” the reporter wrote. “Its beauty and splendor rivals the hotels of Europe and it is called the Monte Carlo of the Western Hemisphere.”

Opening night that third year, the ballroom was converted into a setting for a “Spanish fiesta,” with “intriguing lighting effects of Spanish and American lanterns,” priceless shawls and appropriate formal dress for such an occasion. Guests included American notables Harry F. Guggenheim and wife, A.J. Drexel Biddle and wife, and the British Duke of Manchester and his actress wife Kathleen Dawes (married there). They were joined by prominent South Americans and European royals. 

Fast forward nearly two decades to when Trafficante managed this casino and others in Havana. Some say he ran it into the ground but not before drawing movie stars and other celebrities, including Frank Sinatra, Ernest Hemingway and assorted world figures such as Winston Churchill to the hotel. Fidel Castro chased Trafficante – and the rest of the mob – out of Cuba a year or so after he overthrew Fulgencio Battista in 1959. (Mobster Jimmy Fratianno claimed Castro sent Trafficante to Florida to spy on Cubans there; later Trafficante was linked to a plot to assassinate Castro.)

The 457-room, eight-story hotel has had its ups and downs over the years during Castro's cash-strapped regime. It was restored during the 1990s in a bid to attract more tourists. Most of its glamour belongs to history, not the present. See link above for more photos.

* Ben "Bugsy" Siegel's Las Vegas dream, the Flamingo Hotel, opened in 1946.

Tags: Casino history, mob history, Meyer Lansky, Sandi Lansky, gambling casino, organized crime in Cuba, film researcher,

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/Hotel_Nacional_de_Cuba_-_panoramio.jpg