The hotels are all beautiful— even the hideous ones!
—JULIE HARRIS AS RUTH ARNOLD IN THE PLAY THE WARM PENINSULA, 1959
Harry Mufson was banned from the Fontainebleau, but he was curious to see for himself what all the fuss was about, so one day he put on a disguise and snuck inside. He looked around and thought, “I can do better.”
In June of 1955 Mufson bought the 8Ei-acre parcel one site north of the Fontainebleau, which had been the estate of Albert Warner, one of the founding brothers of Warner Bros. Studios. Mufson announced to the press that he was going to build a hotel even more elegant and luxurious than the Fontainebleau. It was going to be called the Eden Roc, named for the gardens of the grand Hôtel du Cap Eden-Roc in the south of France, and the architect would be none other than Morris Lapidus.
The Eden Roc and the Fontainebleau would be separated only by a parking lot.
Novack was gutted with rage. He called Lapidus and demanded that he not design the Eden Roc, but Lapidus didn't see why he had to give up the commission. For Lapidus there was no downside; he would have two of the largest, most lavish hotels in Miami Beach right next to each other, and as a bonus it would aggravate Ben Novack.
In retaliation, Novack forbade Lapidus to ever set foot in the Fontainebleau again. He was banished from his own creation. The two men hated each other so much that they even insulted the hotel they had created together. Novack told a reporter from the Saturday Evening Post that Lapidus's contribution to the Fontainebleau “stinks,” and in response Lapidus told the reporter, “Frankly it's not the kind of place I'd care to stay in myself.”
Harry Mufson turned out to be almost as ignorant a client as Novack. Lapidus recounted that when he suggested there be a Baroque influence in the interior of the Eden Roc as opposed to the French Provincial used in the Fontainebleau, Mufson shouted in exasperation, “I don't care if it's Baroque or Brooklyn, just get me plenty of glamour and make sure it screams luxury!” Lapidus once showed Mufson a $10,000 copy of the statue Winged Victory that he wanted to place at the entrance of the hotel and Mufson demanded, “Where's the head? For ten grand I want a head!” Yet the men got along well enough to make a buying trip to Europe together, spending a total of $2 million on furnishings for the lobby and public spaces of the hotel.
The Eden Roc opened in December of 1955, just one year after the Fontainebleau, at a cost of $13 million. Although it was smaller and not as striking as the Fontainebleau, it was nevertheless a handsome, gracefully designed building with a grand driveway, a long striped portico, and an edifice with two full-length vertical panels of sparkling glass tiles tinted in gradations of green to emulate the depth of the sea. On its roof was what looked like an ocean liner's smokestack with the name Eden Roc spelled out in neon. The public space was just as overdone but felt less staged than the Fontainebleau's lobby did, although somehow familiar. All of Lapidus's bag of tricks were evident: There were white marble floors inlaid with large black fleurs-de-lis (instead of bow ties), and there was a sunken circular seating area with columns similar to the ones at the Fontainebleau, and— no surprise— a floating staircase that seemed to go nowhere that looked about the same as the one in the Fontainebleau and was in the same general place in the lobby. As with the Fontainebleau, grandiose names abounded. The lobby was called the Grand Lobby, the formal dining room was the Mona Lisa Room, and the bars were the Café Pompeii and Harry's Bar, the latter named not after Harry Mufson but after the famed Harry's Bar in Venice.
The Fontainebleau by itself was a showstopper, but the two hotels side by side on Collins Avenue was a sensation. All anybody talked about that season was the Fontainebleau and the Eden Roc right next to each other, and Lapidus and Mufson feuding with Novack, and after a while all the talk began to drive Novack insane. The Eden Roc siphoned away business and publicity, and, most important, it took away some of his pleasure in the Fontainebleau. The Eden Roc was in his face forever. He could not live that way, and he decided that he would hurt Harry Mufson in the worst possible way he could think of: He would take away the sun.
In 1956 Novack took a 99-year lease on the parking lot that separated the Fontainebleau and the Eden Roc and went “back to the bathroom,” as Ben Novack Jr. put it, to design a new wing for the Fontainebleau.1* Ostensibly what Novack wanted to do was add more guest rooms and build a much larger ballroom to attract convention business. The new wing, to be called the Chateau building, was a rectangular slab that was a good complement to the main building's arc. The problem was, as described by Ben Jr., that there was a fourteen-foot setback from the neighboring property to the north— the Eden Roc— and to build a 40,000-square-foot, pillarless ballroom that could accommodate 3,000 people, the wall facing the Eden Roc would have to be solid to support all the weight. That would be a blank wall, seventeen stories tall, painted gray, only fourteen feet from the Eden Roc, and not only would everyone in the Eden Roc have to look up at an ugly blank gray wall, but every day, beginning around noon, the tall gray wall would block the sunlight from the Eden Roc pool. It cast what the Miami Herald described as “an immense blob of cool shadow over the pool most of the day” The finished wall had only three windows in it, the dining room windows of Ben Novack's new penthouse apartment, so, as the story goes, he could spit out the window at the Eden Roc.
Ben Novack Jr. refutes that his father ever spit at the Eden Roc or that he built the wall to block the sun for spite. “My father didn't give a shit what was going on next door,” he said. “My father didn't even realize that the state of Florida is at a slight angle northeast and at twelve thirty in the afternoon the wall would cast a shadow over the Eden Roc,” he added, with a smile. “Meanwhile, the result was the most godawful ugly wall.”
Mufson and his partners in the Eden Roc sued Novack over the wall and the shadow it cast, but the court held that the Eden Roc had no air rights to the space and that the courts could not compel a building— or Novack's handiwork— not to cast a shadow.2*
The shadow over the Eden Roc's pool became a national news story and threatened to ruin their business, and at tremendous cost Mufson and his partners were forced to build a second large pool, this one up on a deck on the north side of the hotel, away from the “Spite Wall.” They also instituted what was called “ anti-shadow” attractions, including waterskiing on Indian Creek and free yacht rides. For many years the perception prevailed that the Eden Roc's swimming pool got no sun. The reservation clerks went to great pains to point out that a sunny new pool had been built, yet the Eden Roc, in many ways a more elegant hotel than the Fontainebleau, would always be perceived to live in its shadow.
THE EDEN Roc, like the Fontainebleau, became a favorite haunt of underworld figures. “The boys,” as the mobsters were called, rented cabanas by the year. Jules Levitt, one of the biggest bookies on the Beach and a partner in the infamous S&G Syndicate, was arrested in one of the cabanas of the Eden Roc for taking book, and in 1961 the Florida state attorney general's office asked that the switchboard be shut down because of all the bookmaking. There was also one hapless guest who found a gun in her night-table drawer and, thinking it was a cigarette lighter, pulled the trigger and put a bullet in the wall. At some point the disgusted Eden Roc shareholders filed suit against Mufson and his partners for being in league with the bookies.
Harry Mufson might have been hooked up with his share of gangsters and bookies, but he loved the hotel business and he was good at it. He was generous to the people who worked for him, and the staff of the hotel had no complaints. When there was an employee strike, Mufson put on an apron and washed dishes in the kitchen. One night when Pearl Bailey wasn't able to appear in the nightclub, Mufson picked up the check for the entire audience. Mufson booked Barbra Streisand to headline the hotel's nightclub just as she was starting out, and he loaned her his car because she was so broke. On the second night of Streisand's run he bought out her contract because the nightclub was half empty. Mufson liked rubbing elbows with celebrities, and sometimes he'd invite the big stars staying at the hotel to his house on Pine Tree Drive for dinner. It irked Novack when Mufson was invited to travel to Europe with Frank Sinatra to see the Ingemar Johansson–Floyd Patterson title fight in Sweden.
Mufson was a nice guy, but he was also a heavy drinker and smoked two packs of cigarettes a day. He spent too many late nights at Harry's Bar. In the late 1960s he bought the grand old Roney Plaza Hotel, and he was making plans for its major renovation when he had a heart attack and nearly died. At his doctor's insistence, Mufson sold the hotel in 1968, and the following year he reluctantly sold his shares in the Eden Roc and retired permanently from the hotel business. He remained active with the family chain of Jefferson stores, which he sold to Montgomery Ward for $37 million in stock. In 1973, four years after selling the Eden Roc, he died of a second massive heart attack in his Collins Avenue apartment at the age of sixty-four.
The new owner of the Eden Roc was one of Mufson's partners, fifty-year-old Morris Landsburgh, who was already a celebrity in Miami Beach. He was an elegant man who was twice named one of America's best-dressed men, and he had large real estate holdings in Miami Beach hotels, including the Deauville, Sherry Frontenac, Casablanca, Versailles, Crown, Saxony, and Sans Souci, the latter of which Landsburgh bought from Harry Mufson. He owned a Rolls-Royce automobile, which he kept parked right on the ramp of the hotel, and he was known for ceremoniously bowing to guests and saying “Good evening, you all.” Landsburgh made his fortune despite having a silver plate covering half of his head and being deaf in one ear, the result of a run-in with an ice truck when he was a little boy. He was also the inventor and proponent of the “American plan” for hotels that included two meals a day included with the room charge.
Ten years before Landsburgh bought the Eden Roc, he and his business partner, Sam Cohen, took controlling interest in the Flamingo Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas for $10.6 million, a deal brokered by Meyer Lansky, who received a $200,000 finder's fee.
The fee was paid to Lansky in installments from the $10 million that Landsburgh and Cohen were skimming from the Flamingo's gambling proceeds, charged federal agents. In 1973 Landsburgh and Cohen pleaded guilty to federal charges of income tax evasion and of conspiring with Lansky to defraud the Internal Revenue Service. Landsburgh and Cohen were each given a one-year prison sentence but served only half their time, in a minimum-security prison in Florida. They passed the days playing tennis and cards, and they were served meals cooked by the chef at the Eden Roc.
After Landsburgh and Cohen's release in 1973, they were forced to give up their liquor license at the Eden Roc and they sold the hotel to Howard Garfinkel, a Miami Beach real estate investor whose portfolio included several large apartment buildings. Gar finkel was a tall, heavyset man who wore large diamond pinkie rings, owned two Rolls-Royces (one for him and one for his wife), and had a mansion on Pine Tree Drive. He didn't know much about running a hotel, but he was a fanatic about the hotel's appearance. He kept a chart of the positions of every sofa and table in the lobby and had the staff paint over the tire smudges on the white curbs of the hotel's grand front driveway. Once an hour a maintenance man polished away the fingerprints on the bronze doors to the elevators. People were mighty impressed with Howard Garfinkel until he made the mistake of pledging $3 million to the University of Miami to expand its art museum. When the money was not forthcoming it was discovered that Mr. Garfinkel was— surprise!— an ex-con who had defrauded two banks in New Jersey for $200,000. Soon the paychecks at the Eden Roc began to bounce and employees staged a lobby protest, chanting “We want money!” It wasn't great for business, and on June 5, 1975, the Garfinkels declared bankruptcy. Morris Landsburgh and company, acting with a court trustee, took back $6 million in mortgages on the building and reopened it under their auspices while they tried to find another buyer. Landsburgh never lived to see it sold. Like Harry Mufson, he too died of a massive heart attack, one February morning in 1977 at the age of fifty-eight, in his Collins Avenue apartment.
A dizzying procession of wannabes and owners followed. In 1978 Bob Guccione, anticipating that gambling would be legalized in Miami Beach, made a $15.5 million offer to buy the Eden Roc but withdrew it when it became clear the gambling bill would fail. In May 1980 the Saudi Arabian sheikh Wadji Tahlawi bought the hotel, calling it “a lovely lady in need of a face-lift,” and professed he was “in love” with the Eden Roc and would never sell it. He spent a paltry $7 million on renovations, painted it beige, and added some fountains in the lobby and smoky mirrors in the elevators, but he refurbished only three floors of rooms. He gave a gala at the hotel at which a Bengal tiger named Caliph was paraded through the ballroom. Wadji Tahlawi saw no pitfalls in a devout Muslim owning a hotel in which the guests were predominantly Jewish. “Jew or Moslem,” he said, “you are talking about a different idea of how to get to paradise.” But the Jews only believed in a paradise here on earth— Miami Beach— and when it became clear no Jew would stay at a hotel owned by an Arab, he sold it to Budapest-born developer Tibor Hollo for $22.5 million in December of 1981.
Among many other holdings, Tibor Hollo was the developer of the 42-story, $750 million Venetia office complex, shopping center, and condominium skyscraper on Biscayne Bay that had more floor space than the Empire State Building— with a mortgage almost as big. By 1991, after the country skidded into a hiccup of a recession, Tibor Hollo's real estate investments began to go south, one by one, and he never had the money to make the necessary renovations on the Eden Roc. By then the hotel had $30 million in mortgages against it and it wound up in the hands of a court-appointed receiver. In 1992 hotelier Ian Schrager and entertainment impresario David Geffen toyed with the idea of buying the Eden Roc for $12 million, and Schrager had a construction and design team pore over the hotel before they decided to opt out. In October 1992 the New York real estate investor Irving Goldman's family bought the hotel from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation for $14.6 million, and they sunk $28 million into a long-overdue renovation. The Goldman family ran the hotel for six years before selling it for $45 million to the Blackacre Capital Group and Destination Hotels & Resorts, an international organization that ran twenty-three hotels in the United States.
The hotel is now known as the Eden Roc Renaissance Beach Resort & Spa, and in 2007 it went through a much needed $170 million upgrade that included the addition of two new ballrooms totaling 14,000 square feet, a 5,000-square-foot rooftop convention hall, a new spa, and a Starbucks. There was only one problem with the Eden Roc's spiffy new look— that ugly Spite Wall. The owners of the Fontainebleau at that time said they would consider demolishing it and build in its stead a twenty-story glass tower with five hundred hotel rooms connecting the Eden Roc with the Fontainebleau. But that turned out to be too ambitious a project and the idea was dropped. The Miami Beach Historic Preservation Board suggested that if the Spite Wall was going to remain, perhaps windows could be put into its bleak blank side. But it turned out that cutting windows into the facade would necessitate massive steel reinforcements because of the way Ben Novack had deliberately built it. “I don't know why the building was built this way,” said project architect John Nichols, “but it was.” It turned out that the Fontainebleau structural plans no longer exist.
Since the blank wall looked like it was there to stay, the corporation that owned the Eden Roc decided the best thing to do was build their own blank wall to face it. The Eden Roc added a condominium addition, and now there are now two windowless walls facing each other, only fourteen feet apart by measuring tape but as wide as the Grand Canyon in spirit.
1* Even though Novack had banned Lapidus from entering the Fontainebleau, he still had the temerity to ask him if he was interested in designing the new wing. Lapidus passed.
2* In 2001 the Delano and Surfcomber hotels sued the builders of the new W hotel being built out of the Ritz Plaza, claiming that the W's seven-story structure would cast a shadow over their pool complexes.