South Beach's Mercury Hotel used to be a flophouse
Friday, March 20, 2009 at 12:33PM Improved South Pointe Park in Miami Beach to reopen (Miami Herald):
After a renovation that lasted 20 months and cost $22.4 million, South Pointe Park will reopen to the public Sunday -- with free events including yoga classes, kite flying and history lessons about the storied South of Fifth neighborhood.
I wonder if they'll mention the history of the nearby Nemo Hotel (now the Mercury Hotel) on 1st and Collins Avenue:
To the south is the Nemo Hotel, a Spanish-style 100-room building with Romanesque pillars and an open courtyard of dead and dying trees.
For $50 a week, a Nemo patron gets an eight-foot by 10-foot room with peeling walls, broken floor and a ratty bed. The hallways reek of urine. The Nemo, consistently cited for hundreds of housing violations, is owned by Lawrence Taylor, vice chairman of the city's Minimum Housing Standards Board.
The rooms now are filled with refugees, aimless and poor Americans and an assortment of Miamians spending the weekend on the Beach. Outside, young men and women drink beer and watch the occasional traffic on Collins Avenue. At 2 a.m., the junkies and young prostitutes walk by, eliciting only catcalls.
The Nemo , a block from the police station, provoked 216 police calls between July 19, 1981 and June 14, 1982, almost twice as many as any other address in Miami Beach. It is infamous among the officers for its stabbings, robberies and shootings. When asked about South Beach, the first thing police usually mention is The Nemo.
"That place is the worst on South Beach," says Sgt. Thomas Hunker, a 10-year veteran.
Across from the southern side of The Nemo is the Four Freedoms, a Jewish nursing home, where the tenants stay inside, singing songs like Hava Nagila and playing cards. But, mostly, they stay in bed.
--Miami Herald, August 29, 1982
Reader Comments (6)
From 1982, WoW! How did you discover this one...? This is a great blog and thank you for the historical Nemo(converted to)Mercury Hotel info. SBI sold these hotel units out when converted in 2003! Now it's tough to get a glass of champagne for $50 let alone a "room for a week!" Today, if you had to pinpoint the seediest area in SoBe, it would be around 6th and Meridian. It's one of the micro 2 block areas that never got the facelift during the boom years! Crime in SoBe is still relatively low compared to Downtown... (isn't it?)
Talking to former Miami Beach mayor Alex Daoud. Right after the Mariel Boatlift began in April 1980, the tent cities at the Orange Bowl and under I95 filled up so quickly that the overflow of refugees ended up in South Beach. Many of the criminal element from Mariel settled South of Fifth and that neighborhood quickly became known as a war zone, with the Nemo Hotel as ground zero. This was partly because of the building moratorium that was enacted in the early 70s in an effort to redevelop South of Fifth. I'll do a post on that shortly. Yes, 6th and Meridian has been the worst area of the beach since the late 80s/early 90s, notorious for crack dealing. And parts of downtown are still much more dangerous than South Beach
Talking to former Miami Beach mayor Alex Daoud. Right after the Mariel Boatlift began in April 1980, the tent cities at the Orange Bowl and under I95 filled up so quickly that the overflow of refugees ended up in South Beach. Many of the criminal element from Mariel settled South of Fifth and that neighborhood quickly became known as a war zone, with the Nemo Hotel as ground zero. This was partly because of the building moratorium that was enacted in the early 70s in an effort to redevelop South of Fifth. I'll do a post on that shortly. Yes, 6th and Meridian has been the worst area of the beach since the late 80s/early 90s, notorious for crack dealing. And parts of downtown are still much more dangerous than South Beach
Quite "scary" for me...I mean those drinking dudes. ..
This should be renovated so as not to "scare" vacationers...anyway, in totality, it looks nice.
This is quite an interesting read, i totally loved reading it.