History
Lapidus once wrote, “If you create a stage and it is grand, everyone who enters will play their part.” He conceived of the ideas for the hotel each morning as he took a subway from Flatbush to his office in Manhattan. The hotel was built by hotelier Ben Novack on the Harvey Firestone estate. Novack owned and operated the hotel until its bankruptcy in 1977.
The Fontainebleau is famous in judicial circles for its victory in the landmark 1959 Florida District Courts of Appeal decision, Fontainebleau Hotel Corp. v. Forty-Five Twenty-Five, Inc. 114 So. 2d 357, in which the Fontainebleau Hotel successfully appealed an injunction by the neighboring Eden Roc Hotel, to prevent construction of an expansion that blocked sunlight to the Eden Roc's swimming pool. The Court rejected the Eden Roc's claim to an easement allowing sunlight, in favor of affirming the Fontainebleau's vertical property rights to build on its land. It stated that the "ancient lights" doctrine has been unanimously repudiated in the United States.
In the 1970s a suite in the hotel was used by members of the Black Tuna Gang to run their operations. This is recounted in the 2011 documentary Square Grouper, which follows the burgeoning marijuana-smuggling trade of the mid-to-late 1970s. It was at this time that large amounts of the drug were being shipped to southeastern Florida - the film goes so far as to aver that more than ninety percent of the United States' illicit demand was being met through such channels.
The hotel closed a large part of its property in 2006, though one building remained open to hotel guests, and the furnishings were available for sale. The expanded hotel and its new condominium buildings re-opened in November 2008.
On December 22, 2008, the Fontainebleau was added to the U.S. National Register of Historic Places.
Read more about this topic: Fontainebleau Miami Beach
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