A Demolished Miami 1920s Boom-Time Skyscraper
On March 29, 1926, more than 3,000 people gathered in downtown Miami to celebrate the opening of a new 15-story tower built for the city’s real estate industry. Over the next few decades, the building would house an illegal gambling operation, an office for the American Nazi Party, and eventually nothing at all but squatters, before it was demolished by hand, floor by floor, to make way for a college campus.
The Florida Land Boom and the Miami Realty Board Building’s 1926 Opening
The building at 327 NE First Avenue opened as the Miami Realty Board Building at the height of the Florida land boom, a period when the state’s population and property values were both climbing at a pace that seemed permanent. The tower’s opening ceremony drew over 3,000 attendees, a real measure of how central the real estate industry had become to Miami’s civic identity at the time.
That confidence didn’t last. Later in 1926, the Great Miami Hurricane struck the city directly, and the brand-new building was damaged in the same storm that effectively ended the land boom altogether.
From Realty Board Building to Pacific House Hotel
The building took on new names as its ownership and purpose shifted over the following decades. It became known as the Postal Building in the 1930s, then the Pacific Building by 1945. In 1960, its owner converted the top nine floors into a hotel, branded the Pacific House Hotel, while the bottom six floors remained office space.
The hotel’s reputation didn’t stay respectable for long. In February 1962, police raided an illegal gambling operation running out of the fourth floor. A year later, in March 1963, three members of the American Nazi Party leased an office on the fifth floor.
The Pacific House Hotel’s Decline and 1970 Demolition
By the mid-1960s, photographs of the building after Hurricane Betsy already showed visible neglect. The decline continued through the rest of the decade, and by the time the building’s fate was sealed, it had become what one local history site describes as a “high-rise hobo jungle,” largely given over to squatters.
In 1970, the building was cleared to make way for the new downtown campus of Miami-Dade Junior College, funded in part by a land donation from Mitchell Wolfson.
City officials ruled out dynamite as a demolition method, and workmen instead dismantled the tower by hand, chipping away at its floors from the top down over several months.
