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By Seth H. Bramson Although almost all of the articles that have appeared in this column have dealt with a special moment in the passage of time in Greater Miami’s history it is possible that the era of the street and electric railways in Greater Miami—the time of the trolley—may, indeed, have been the most […]
Archive for the ‘COLUMNS BY SETH H. BRAMSON’ Category
A Special Moment In Time: The Time Of The Trolley – Coral Gables Part II
February 15th, 2019 
Bad Brad 
Posted in COLUMNS BY SETH H. BRAMSON 
Tags: A Special Moment In Time: The Time Of The Trolley – Coral Gables Part II 
Comments Off on A Special Moment In Time: The Time Of The Trolley – Coral Gables Part IIA Special Moment In Time: The Time Of The Trolley: Part I
February 12th, 2019 Bad Brad By Seth H. Bramson To paraphrase a wonderful New York Globe editorial from the very early years of the 20th century, “Yes, totteleh, there were trolley cars in Miami! And Coral Gables! And Miami Beach!” Indeed, for some 35 glorious years, streetcars or trolley cars, today returning to cities throughout America under the updated moniker […]
Posted in COLUMNS BY SETH H. BRAMSON Tags: A Special Moment In Time: The Time Of The Trolley: Part I Comments Off on A Special Moment In Time: The Time Of The Trolley: Part IA Special Moment In Time: “Wait’ll We Get The Big One!”
February 1st, 2019 Bad Brad By Seth H. Bramson As I noted in my last column, there are no few front running phonies, dumb clucks, muppets, minkees, mutts, marooks and out and out MO-rons who love to tell us to “just wait’ll we get ‘the big one,’!” and as was mentioned, my reply, although not necessarily in these words, is […]
Posted in COLUMNS BY SETH H. BRAMSON, ENTERTAINMENT NEWS Tags: A Special Moment In Time: “Wait’ll We Get The Big One!” Comments Off on A Special Moment In Time: “Wait’ll We Get The Big One!”A Special Moment In Time: The Five Terrible Events of 1926 Part III
January 27th, 2019 Bad Brad By Seth H. Bramson Over the past two columns, readers of Mr. Berkwitt’s website have learned of the first four of the five terrible events that made 1926 one of the two (along with 1896) most memorable, and to some extent, legendary years in Greater Miami’s illustrious and glorious history. Just by surviving those events, […]
Posted in COLUMNS BY SETH H. BRAMSON, ENTERTAINMENT NEWS Tags: A Special Moment In Time: The Five Terrible Events of 1926 Part III Comments Off on A Special Moment In Time: The Five Terrible Events of 1926 Part IIIA Special Moment In Time: The Five Terrible Events of 1926 Part II
January 25th, 2019 Bad Brad By Seth H. Bramson As was noted in our last column, 1926, which business and commercial interests would legitimately assume would simply be a continuation of the several great “boom” years preceding it, were distressed when the four-masted Danish sailing freighter Prinz Valdemar capsized in the turning basin at the mouth of the Miami harbor […]
Posted in COLUMNS BY SETH H. BRAMSON, ENTERTAINMENT NEWS Tags: A Special Moment In Time: The Five Terrible Events of 1926 Part II Comments Off on A Special Moment In Time: The Five Terrible Events of 1926 Part IIAuthor Seth Bramson Personal Appearance on January 23rd
January 22nd, 2019 Bad Brad Posted in COLUMNS BY SETH H. BRAMSON Tags: Author Seth Bramson Personal Appearance on January 23rd Comments Off on Author Seth Bramson Personal Appearance on January 23rdA Special Moment In Time: The Five Terrible Events Of 1926
January 21st, 2019 Bad Brad By Seth H. Bramson As our readers have learned in this over the past several weeks, the year 1896 was truly the crucible year for the then becoming-a-city-that-year community, one that was so tiny that, prior to Henry Flagler’s commitment to extend the railroad to the shores of Biscayne Bay and to build one of […]
Posted in COLUMNS BY SETH H. BRAMSON, ENTERTAINMENT NEWS Tags: A Special Moment In Time: The Five Terrible Events Of 1926 Comments Off on A Special Moment In Time: The Five Terrible Events Of 1926A Special Moment In Time: The Bathing Casinos Part III
January 17th, 2019 Bad Brad By Seth H. Bramson As was noted in this column previously, there were a total of five bathing casinos, only one of which—the Harvey Baker Graves owned Sunny Isles Casino—had open gaming. The first of the bathing casinos was the Avery Smith and James C. Warr-owned Ocean Beach later Smith’s Casino, located just north of […]
Posted in COLUMNS BY SETH H. BRAMSON, ENTERTAINMENT NEWS Tags: A Special Moment In Time: The Bathing Casinos Part III Comments Off on A Special Moment In Time: The Bathing Casinos Part IIIA Very Special Moment in Time: The Casinos
January 10th, 2019 Bad Brad By Seth H. Bramson “Gambling?!! There’s gambling going on here?!! This place is to be closed immediately!” “Your winnings Captain Reynaud.” “Thank you!” That was one of the great scenes from Casablanca, where, of course, a kiss was but a kiss, and a sigh was but a sigh, among the fundamental things we do, as […]
Posted in COLUMNS BY SETH H. BRAMSON Tags: A Very Special Moment in Time: The Casinos Comments Off on A Very Special Moment in Time: The CasinosA Special Moment In Time: The Real Steve Hannagan
January 7th, 2019 Bad Brad By Seth H. Bramson As has been noted in several of my Miami Beach histories, particularly “Miami Beach” in Arcadia’s “Images of America” series and “Sunshine, Stone Crabs and Cheesecake: The Story of Miami Beach,” published by The History Press in October of 2009, there is good reason to believe that, while Carl Fisher and […]
A Special Moment In Time: There Was A Real Steve Hannagan!
January 3rd, 2019 Bad Brad By Seth H. Bramson Through the years and in the books about the city, nowhere near enough has ever been made of and about the man who was truly behind Carl Fisher’s and Jim Allison’s success in promoting a place called Miami Beach, that man’s name being Steve Hannagan. But so little is known about […]
A Special Moment In Time: Brown’s May Not Have Been The First Inn On Miami Beach!
December 28th, 2018 Bad Brad By Seth H. Bramson The “conventional wisdom” dealing with Miami Beach’s history has, for almost the entire history of the city, held that the first hotel on Miami Beach was Brown’s, on south Ocean Drive. The only problem with that “c w” may be that the U. S. Lifesaving Service’s Biscayne House of Refuge, located […]
An Update On Upcoming Meetings And Talks
December 26th, 2018 Bad Brad By Seth H. Bramson For this column, dear friends, a couple of notes regarding upcoming events to which all of you are warmly invited and to which I truly hope that we will have the pleasure of seeing you at. The first is the MIAMI MEMORABILIA COLLECTORS CLUB and MIAMI PIONEERS/NATIVES of DADE monthly meeting. […]
A Special Moment in Time: Ida and Isidor Cohen Part III
December 21st, 2018 Bad Brad By Seth H. Bramson As noted in the previous discussion(s) Isidor Cohen arrived on the shores of Biscayne Bay on February 6, 1896, having availed himself of the train service then operating into Jupiter in what was then still Dade County and would be until 1909, when Palm Beach County was created. However, it was […]
A Special Moment In Time – Ida And Isidor Cohen: The Founders
December 15th, 2018 Bad Brad By Seth H. Bramson Who was this Isidor Cohen fellow, and why does he deserve to be memorialized in a history column in an important and as widely read blog such as this? As it happens, and as was noted in our last column, Isidor Cohen was Miami’s first permanent Jewish settler, he having arrived […]
A Special Moment In Time: Ida And Isidor Cohen
December 11th, 2018 Bad Brad By Seth H. Bramson There are so very many revered names in the history of Greater Miami, from the Weiss family of Joe’s Stone Crab Restaurant to the Galbut family of Miami Beach, to the Traurigs and the Hechts (Flagler Dog Track) and the Pallots, Julia Tuttle, Mary and William Brickell, Everest and John Sewell, […]
A Very Special Moment In Time: It All Began With “Cheesecake”—Seriously!—Part I
December 5th, 2018 Bad Brad By Seth H. Bramson “Our town,” Miami Beach— one of the world’s greatest resorts and one of the most utterly corrupt cities in North America—has had more words written about its history than any other city of its size in America. The story is so incredible, so fascinating, so intriguing and so replete with so […]
A Very Special Moment In Time: The Legend Begins
November 27th, 2018 Bad Brad By Seth H. Bramson Although the exact date has been lost in the mists of the intervening 106 years, it appears that one Joe Weiss, with wife Jenny and son Jesse in tow, arrived on the shores of Biscayne Bay sometime in 1912. It is evident that they stepped on to the sands of the […]
A Special Moment In Time: Brown’s May Not Have Been The First Inn On Miami Beach!
November 22nd, 2018 Bad Brad By Seth H. Bramson The “conventional wisdom” dealing with Miami Beach’s history has, for almost the entire history of the city, held that the first hotel on Miami Beach was Brown’s, on south Ocean Drive. The only problem with that “c w” may be that the U. S. Lifesaving Service’s Biscayne House of Refuge, located […]
A Special Moment In Time Miami’s Crucible Year: Part II
November 16th, 2018 Bad Brad By Seth H. Bramson As noted in our previous column, 1896 was the single most important year in the history of the tiny unincorporated village on the shores of Biscayne Bay as it transitioned to becoming a city without the intermediate steps of villagehood or township. The previous article introduced the first two events that […]
A Special Moment In Time… 1896: Miami’s Most Crucial Year
November 12th, 2018 Bad Brad By Seth H. Bramson There are certain years in certain cities that can be defined as “crucible” years, meaning that those years were either the single most important in and to the history of that particular town or city or one of several that fit that definition. Chicago, for example, will always be defined by […]
The Beginning of Real Progress on Both Sides of the Bay
November 7th, 2018 Bad Brad By Seth H. Bramson As you and we noted last time, Field and Osborn were bitterly disappointed with the loss of almost their entire coconut crop to “the varmints” and determined that it was time to sell, which they did, to an elderly Quaker and his son-in-law, who bought the mangrove sandbar island from them. […]
The Three Seminole Wars, The Naming of a County And The Whites Begin To Arrive – Part II
November 7th, 2018 Bad Brad By Seth H. Bramson Our last column brought us up to the late 1880s or early 1890s, when Elnathan Field and Ezra Osborne “lost their shirts” attempting to cultivate coconuts in the sand of the mangrove sandbar island on the east side of Biscayne Bay and we closed by noting that they had returned to […]
The Three Seminole Wars, The Naming of a County And The Whites Begin To Arrive — Part II
November 2nd, 2018 Bad Brad By Seth H. Bramson Our last column brought us up to the late 1880s or early 1890s, when Elnathan Field and Ezra Osborne “lost their shirts” attempting to cultivate coconuts in the sand of the mangrove sandbar island on the east side of Biscayne Bay and we closed by noting that they had returned to […]
And So It (Our History) Begins!
November 1st, 2018 Bad Brad By Seth H. Bramson As we told you (wrote, actually!) we have essentially concluded the discussion of the various South Florida local and Florida transportation history books which we have written, those in addition to more than 300 articles, including seven in refereed or juried publications. (My dear and beloved brother got Dad’s artistic talent […]
