The Bramson Archive: What It Is and How It Came To Be – Part III

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By Seth H. Bramson

We concluded our previous column by hopefully conveying the excitement of a little boy who loved trains as the FEC’s famous streamliner roared through North Miami enroute to Jacksonville and, eventually, New York, his joy at seeing that train go by every Saturday morning palpable as he traveled in the car with his father, heading for the several business stops that Dad had to make.

But there was, of course, more. It was a different—and much earlier—Miami and I can remember clearly lying in my bed in our house at 8035 Cecil Street and actually being able to clearly hear the FEC’s locomotive whistles as they resonated across Biscayne Bay and into my bedroom on Biscayne Point. My soul had unquestionably been touched.

Although having a good few friends at Biscayne Elementary School including, among others, the late Barry Bratter and the very much still extant Ricky Neross I was somewhat of a loner in certain endeavors, one of those being my personal holiday tradition which began, if I remember correctly, when I was in fifth or sixth grade. But because there is an almost eight year age difference between me and the brother who I so adore, he was not, until some years later, part of my travels or adventures.

I was fairly familiar with the routes of the Miami Beach Railway Company’s blue buses (they were white when we moved to Miami Beach but when the old Fords and Twin Coaches were replaced with the GMC’s, light blue became the company’s color of choice while on the Miami side the Miami Transit Company’s buses were painted a light green) and that first year and for the several thereafter I boarded the “K” bus at 81st Street and Hawthorne Avenue for the fairly lengthy ride down Miami Beach and across the MacArthur Causeway to the first stop on the Miami side, right in front of Sears and it was at that point that my yearly odyssey would begin.

Enjoying the model train layout in Sears I would then walk south along the Boulevard past the Royal Castle building at 11th Street, eventually passing the Miami News building at Sixth Street, which, although known only to a very few diehard historians, was the site of Miami’s first Florida East Coast Railway passenger station. It would be only six more blocks to Flagler Street and I would turn west there and proceed to the various stores, including Kress, McCrory’s, Richard’s and Burdine’s to enjoy the train layouts. (It would be several years, though, before I discovered the joys of Abbott Hobbies on the Northeast Second Avenue side in the Alfred I DuPont building and the wonderful almost magical environment of Jahn the Magic Man on Northeast Third Avenue just south of Flagler Street.)

At this point I can’t remember how much money I had with me but it was surely less than a dollar, always being sure that I had the dime or fifteen cents for the return bus fare. And think about it! Would you, as a parent today, let a ten or eleven year old child do anything like that?!! Of course not but Miami, at the time, was a different place in a different world, kind of like the prologue to the original “Star Wars” movies, “….a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” And that, dear readers, was exactly what Miami was: for those of us who grew up here, we grew up in a different world.

And with that we will conclude for this time because our next column will tell you exactly where and how the collecting started, almost to the day! We’ll be back with you shortness!

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