In the late 1940s, Frank Sinatra, then in the early stages of his career, was a guest. It remained there for the next twenty years and represented a favorite feature of the building, especially among many of the area’s youth, who flocked to the Tower on Saturday mornings for its popular Youth Roundup, an interactive program, which sometimes drew prominent entertainers. In the mid-1930s, WIOD radio, one of the city’s earliest radio stations and a part of the growing Cox media holdings, operated on the fourth floor. On the floor above the mezzanine were the offices of the publisher, editors, and the news departments. At the rear of the mezzanine, and rising three stories above street level, were the newspaper’s towering printing presses. Found within the mural was the Edwin Markham poem, an ode to Juan Ponce de Leon and the quest for eternal youth. Adorning the east wall of the mezzanine level was Henry Trumbull’s striking mural depicting a meeting of the Old and New Worlds. Key features of this area were the elaborate columns rising from the center of the mezzanine to its high ceiling.

The internal layout included a broad mezzanine level floor housing the advertising and circulation departments as well as the desks of some journalists.įigure 3: Interior of News Tower in 1925. At 279 feet, it was the tallest building, at least briefly, in the southern United States. The Miami Metropolis, later renamed the Miami Daily News, and, still later, the Miami News, moved into its new quarters in 1925. The firm designed a building whose soaring tower resembled the famed Giralda Tower atop the late Middle Ages’ cathedral in Seville, Spain.

Subsequently, he purchased the tract of land that formerly hosted the above-mentioned railroad station, and hired a young, though already prominent New York-based architectural firm, Schultze and Weaver. Cox wanted a new plant for his newspaper, one that would feature a singular building in a superb location. At the time Cox purchased the paper it occupied a non-descript building on Twelfth Street, renamed Flagler Street in 1921. In the early 1920s, James Cox, a prominent newspaper publisher out of Ohio and an unsuccessful candidate for the American presidency at the outset of that decade purchased the Miami Metropolis, the city’s first newspaper. During that period, which extended into the early 1920s, the site hosted a Boy Scouts’ encampment.įigure 2: Miami Daily News Tower on September 9, 1925. The previous station was razed, and the site was soon overgrown with Australian Pine trees and other types of foliage. First Avenue between Second and Third Streets. In 1912, the Florida East Coast Railway opened a new, non-descript station on today’s N.W. In the mid-1920s, the road was expanded, paved and renamed to Biscayne Boulevard. In the early years, the passage from the station to the hotels consisted of a ride along Bay Shore Drive, which consisted of a surface made of dirt and “Miami Rock”. Passengers, upon decamping from a train, typically boarded a horse-drawn carriage to complete their journey to either Flagler’s luxurious Royal Palm Hotel, the Halcyon Hall Hotel, or rooming houses located throughout the confines of the city’s boundaries. The northern boundary of the city was just a few blocks from the FEC railroad’s terminus into Miami. The picturesque station sat in the northeast confines of the neophyte community. Built by the Florida East Coast (FEC) Railway, whose entry into Miami in April 1896, transformed, overnight, a barren wilderness into a thriving metropolis. Before there was the tower, there was, on a portion of its footprint, the fledgling city of Miami’s first railroad station.

Freedom tower