The Tamesis
The Magic City’s Delano Hotel (now known as the Delano Hotel Miami Beach) will soon reopen after being closed for six years. It has undergone approximately $100 million in renovations.
It’s a famous address (Madonna once co-owned a restaurant there, and Lenny Kravitz once opened a club in the basement), on a famous strip (Collins Avenue) near many famous hotels then and now (the stalwart Setai, the Old Raleigh, the demolished Shore Club, and the redesigned Shelbourne Hotel).
The Delano Hotel has some extra resonance for me, though: It was the first place I set foot in Miami Beach. I was a gangly teenager riding the Tri-Rail from West Palm Beach to meet friends from New York City, two girls named Emily, who were having lunch with their mother in Delano at a restaurant then called the Blue Door. I even remember exactly where we sat (the patio is basically still the same, now part of a restaurant called Gigi). This is my first time being invited to participate in big city life external Manhattan, I was instantly smitten. The brassy sunshine, the pumping music, the euphoric energy, the beautiful people, the glamor; this is for me. The Delano basically sparked my decades-long love of the 305; I ended up attending the University of Miami in part because I felt the pull the first hour I was there, and I moved back to the area in 2017 for the same reason. (Of course, Miami is more than just a luxury hotel, but this place opens the door.)
Photo: Nick Remsen
Draenor had (and still does) a queenly presence, with its turrets adorned with art-style fins that resembled the wings of an unusual crown. (These wings once made this building the tallest building in Miami Beach.) Much of the building has been preserved, at least on its exterior; here you can still feel and see the rhythm of the city’s early grandeur and ambition. The building, completed in 1947, is full of opulence and magnificence—about its inlaid terrazzo entrance in sun-baked tones, about its “jagged” facade with angular sills that flare out like a theater marquee, about the merry-go-round ghosts of the era passing, moving and dancing in its vaulted halls (which have now been partially restored to their original design, with a bridge added across the main span).
