Miami Nightlife History: From Rum Boats to South Beach Clubs

Miami nightlife has always been shaped by rules: who could sell a drink, who could sleep in a hotel, how late the music could play. Each generation found a way around the rule of the day, and those detours left behind some of the city's better stories, from rum boats to a shelved live album to a street of pastel hotels.

A lot of Miami nightlife history is lore, so we stuck to the names and dates that hold up.

Dry on paper: 1913 to 1933

Dade County voted itself dry in 1913, six years before the 18th Amendment was ratified. The law was barely enforced. Once Prohibition went national, Miami had what a smuggler wanted: an open coast, with Havana, Bimini and Nassau a boat ride away. PBS's history of the city describes limousines lined up at the wharves to meet boats full of bootleg liquor, and shipments sent north in refrigerated rail cars, disguised as grapefruit, tomatoes or avocados.

President Warren Harding visited Miami Beach in 1921, soon after his inauguration, and drank with developer Carl Fisher and his associates. In 1925 a worried minister told The New York Times that anyone in a hurry to reach damnation would find "greased banks aplenty in Miami." In 1928 Al Capone bought an estate on Palm Island. Gambling casinos flourished alongside the liquor trade.

The paper trail for individual speakeasies is thin, and many stories told today can't be proved. The smuggling is well documented. Repeal came in 1933, and the party moved into the open.

Swing Street and the supper clubs

The club era that followed was built around winter visitors, who came from December to April. Clubs clustered along Dade Boulevard and on 23rd Street, known as Swing Street. Out on Palm Island, producer Lou Walters, father of Barbara Walters, took over the Palm Island Club around 1940 and relaunched it as a Latin Quarter, with big names for the winter crowd. A fire in August 1959 closed it for good.

The war interrupted everything. From February 1942, Army Air Forces trainees filled Miami Beach, and resort hotels became barracks, mess halls and classrooms. The program began to wind down in the summer of 1943.

The big postwar bet came on December 23, 1948. Murray Weinger, a New Yorker who had managed clubs on Coney Island, opened Copa City at 1301 Dade Boulevard in a curved building by designer Norman Bel Geddes. It had no interior columns, so the ceiling seemed to float over the audience. Dining, shopping, music and radio broadcasts all shared one address. It went bankrupt a few months into 1949, though the club was still booking big names in 1951. Meanwhile, in May 1950, the Senate's Kefauver Committee held its first hearings in Miami, and testimony put the state's large-scale illegal gambling on the record.

The hotels bring the show inside

The next move belonged to the hotels. Morris Lapidus designed the Fontainebleau, which opened in 1954, and then the Eden Roc next door for Harry Mufson, the estranged former partner of Fontainebleau owner Ben Novack. In the early 1960s Novack put up a blank 14-story tower that shaded the Eden Roc's pool, remembered ever since as the spite wall.

Guests no longer had to leave the building for a show. Frank Sinatra performed in the Fontainebleau's nightclub hundreds of times, and in March 1960 an ABC special was filmed there with Sinatra and Elvis Presley, just back from the Army. When the Latin Quarter ended, Lou Walters moved his show into a hotel too.

After 2 a.m. in Overtown

Many stars working the Beach could not stay or eat there. Segregation sent Black performers across the bay to Overtown, where Northwest Second Avenue and the blocks around it were called the Little Broadway of the South, anchored by the Lyric Theater, built in 1913. Promoter Clyde Killens remembered how it went in the 1950s, when Nat King Cole and Sammy Davis Jr. worked hotel shows: "they were off at 2 a.m. and they all would come over to Sir John," meaning the Sir John Hotel in Overtown. Some nights they jammed until morning.

Josephine Baker refused to play Copa City unless her contract admitted patrons "regardless of race, color and creed," and the show went on January 10, 1951, before an integrated audience. On January 12, 1963, Sam Cooke recorded a live set at the Harlem Square Club in Overtown. RCA found the tapes too raw for his pop image and sat on them until 1985.

Interstate 95 cut through Overtown in the 1960s and displaced much of the neighborhood. By 1989 the Lyric was the last Little Broadway building standing.

Havana in exile, tiki on Collins

The Cuban exile added its own chapter. Early exiles opened clubs meant to bring back 1950s Havana, among them Les Violins Supper Club, bought and remodeled by three partners in the early 1960s. Cuban stars took their first jobs in exile there as singing waiters and waitresses, and the floor shows were described as a Las Vegas-style revue from old Havana.

Up the coast, the motels went another way. In the 1950s and 1960s, Collins Avenue in what is now Sunny Isles Beach became Motel Row, with as many as 50 motels competing on theme: concrete camels at the Sahara, a fiberglass pyramid at the Suez. The city's own history recalls bands playing tiki bars out back, the Castaways' Wreck Bar as a late-night hangout, and a lounge on the strip that hosted Tina Turner and Chuck Berry. High-rises replaced most of those motels in the early 2000s.

Art Deco saves South Beach

By the 1970s South Beach was in rough shape. American Heritage described it as little more than a warehouse for elderly people near the poverty line. Barbara Capitman founded the Miami Design Preservation League in 1976, and on May 14, 1979, the Art Deco District became the first urban 20th-century district on the National Register of Historic Places. League co-founder Leonard Horowitz chose the pastels that went onto the run-down Ocean Drive hotels.

Miami Vice, on the air from 1984 to 1989, did the marketing. Set designers dressed empty storefronts and freshened aging hotels, and by 1985 fashion photographers and models were coming for the cheap rooms and backdrops. Clubs followed. A room at Collins Avenue and Espanola Way that had once hosted a dance club for seniors was the Warsaw Ballroom by the end of the decade.

A club on every block

A Miami Herald club guide from May 1994 makes a good snapshot. Amnesia, at 136 Collins Ave., was open-air, with Sunday afternoon T-dances. Bash, on Washington Avenue, counted Sean Penn and Mick Hucknall of Simply Red among its owners. Club One mixed salsa and merengue with disco. Warsaw was "the reigning grand dame of South Beach gay clubs," and the owners of Paragon, the largest gay club on the Beach, had sold their old space to Prince.

DJs and gay clubs set much of the pace, and the Winter Music Conference, founded in 1985, gave the dance music business a reason to meet here each March. Liquid opened in late November 1995 with Ingrid Casares as a partner and her friend Madonna as a frequent guest. The Ultra festival began as a one-day beach party during the conference in March 1999. That same year Warsaw went out of business, and its room became a deli.

Where the night went next

By the early 2000s, downtown Miami had an entertainment district around Northeast 11th Street, packed with 24-hour liquor licenses. Wynwood later added bars of its own, along with its own fights over closing time.

On Miami Beach the argument over hours keeps coming back. Voters rejected a 2 a.m. last call for outdoor clubs on Ocean Drive in 2017, then backed a 2 a.m. cutoff with about 57 percent of the vote in a non-binding poll in November 2021. Judges threw out earlier 2 a.m. rules for parts of South Beach, and in April 2023 a 2 a.m. cutoff took effect South of Fifth, with an exception for places with capacity under 100. More than a century after Dade County went dry, Miami is still debating when the last drink gets poured.

Late nights on Collins today

Porterhouse is at 17004 Collins Ave in Sunny Isles Beach, on the same avenue as the old Motel Row. On Friday and Saturday a live singer performs from 8:30 to 11 PM, then the DJs keep our late-night bar going until 5 AM. See the weekly lineup and book your table on Resy.