A Very Special Moment in Time: The Casinos

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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 time goes by. But this particular episode here on Mr. Berkwitt’s wonderful on-line magazine is about a particular institution on Miami Beach, where, indeed, “times go by” on a very regular basis, including the marvelous days spent at Miami Beach’s four casinos and Sunny Isles’ one casino (although only the Harvey Baker Graves owned Sunny Isles Casino actually had open games of chance as one of its attractions) and in so doing those times leave glorious and rich memories for so many who loved and lived those wonderfully happy days in what for many years was known as “The World’s Playground,” but well before Sunny Isles became the “motel row” that so many of us knew and loved.

Regretfully, although they don’t know it at the time, each generation is convinced that it’s time on Miami Beach was the most glorious of all, which, to quote Shelly Berman, playing the slightly flaky judge on the great TV series Boston Legal, is “poopycock!” It becomes worse when one who has not grown up on, lived on, gone to school on or worked on Miami Beach thinks that he or she knows enough about Miami Beach to write about its history, something that one cannot do (well, legally of course, he or she can write anything about anything that he or she wants to) but most of the time that person generally has no background or real knowledge of and about the city and its history and unless he or she has fulfilled what I often refer to as “the four qualifications” noted above that complete lack of understanding regarding what Miami Beach’s history was and what the city is and was really all about wafts out like an unpleasant odor in said articles or books. Most of those people, including the guy who wrote the article in “Fortune” magazine about the future of Miami, the woman who blew into town, collaborated with the queen bee, wrote another book using the same old tired photos from the usual suspects—libraries, museums and historical societies—all of which had been used before and then blew out of town to go to ehhhhPhilly, as well as, of course, plagiarizing Posner, have no idea what they are talking (writing) about when it comes to Miami Beach.

A perfect example of that was an article written by a flatlander that appeared years ago in Tropic Magazine in The Miami Herald in which the writer, who was from Lon Guyland, attempted to claim that after 1960 (the year her former husband, who she met at the University of Florida, graduated from Miami Beach High) the beach changed and was never the same, which, of course, and as is noted above, was and is pure, unadulterated “poopycock.” That myopic view, of course, was from one who not only did not fulfill the four qualifications but who had become so infatuated with said hubby’s stories about growing up on the beach that she felt herself to be the consummate authority in writing about what it was like when he was here and how it went straight into the terlet as soon as he left for college.

Another of the ludicrous examples is when Beach High classes (one in particular—1964) WASTES $750 paying Miami’s walking fountain of MISinformation to give a historic tour of the city, the ludicrosity of that being that not only did he or does he not fulfill any of the four qualifications, but he knows less about the history of Miami Beach than I do about nuclear physics, and the only thing I know about physics is that they are to be taken when constipated. That is especially galling when, as most people know, I give my tours to Beach High reunion classes at no charge or cost to the class other than my parking and lunch with the class. And, yes, dear friends, after fulfilling those four qualifications and after having written six and one-half (of my thirty-two, none self-published) books on the history of Miami Beach and its northern suburbs, indeed, I might know a bit about (along with the rest of South Florida’s) the city’s history.

That digression from today’s title was necessary because the memories of the great Miami Beach and Sunny Isles casinos are now the province of a terribly few individuals who can actually remember a time during which Miami Beach’s and Sunny Isles’ social life centered on those casinos. Indeed, for those people who then went on to other places and/or other lives, or, sadly, who now sleep with the fishes, those were the greatest Miami Beach days of all. But to true Miami Beach historians—really, really true historians who include only a very select few—those days of the five casinos were some of the palmiest and most glorious in and of the beach’s history. Happily, it has been this writer’s pleasure and privilege to be “the keeper of the flame” and to have kept those memories both alive and well in my innumerable articles and six and one-half Miami Beach histories, among them Miami Beach in Arcadia Publishing’s Images of America series and Sunshine, Stone Crabs and Cheesecake: The Story of Miami Beach, published by The History Press of Charleston, in which a complete chapter is dedicated to and titled The Bathing Casinos and The History of Business on Miami Beach, published by the Miami Beach Chamber of Commerce as well as From Sandbar to Sophistication: The Story of Sunny Isles Beach, written for that great city and also published by The History Press. The “half” refers to our “L’CHAIM: The History of the Jewish Community of Greater Miami” which is approximately half Miami Beach.

Our readers should understand, first and foremost, that the casinos, with the exception of the Harvey Baker Graves built and owned Sunny Isles Casino, were bathing, not gaming casinos, and it was only the Sunny Isles Casino that offered games of chance. People flocked to East Miami or Alton Beach or Ocean Beach (predecessor names of Miami Beach) in order to avail themselves of a day in the surf and to enjoy the entertainments available at the five casinos, with each of them proffering various and different offerings to their guests.

As noted in this column previously, the first of the casinos was a two story building built by Connecticut coastal steamboat captain Richard M. Smith, who, according to Jerry Fisher, a distant relative of Miami Beach’s founder, Carl Fisher, leased the land for the building to one Avery Smith in 1908. Although Avery Smith and his friend, James C. Warr formed the Biscayne Navigation Company to develop a beach resort with suitable transportation to and from Ocean Beach, with Smith rebuilding the facility with docks and piers on either side of the bay and adding a boardwalk as he gave the new destination the name “Fairy Land,” James Warr seems to have disappeared from Miami Beach’s history and is not heard from or mentioned thereafter in any of the Miami Beach histories or books of the era while Smith (Avery) remains a potent and important personage in Miami Beach lore.

In the next column we will delve further into the histories of the five casinos, and I promise you it won’t be “a roll of the dice,” but it will be “a sure thing!” See you shortness, and, as always, with all good wishes.

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