Deauville_Hotel Miami Beach.Shops 67th and Collins
By Patricia Mazzei
Published Jan. 17, 2022
Updated Jan. 20, 2022
MIAMI BEACH — The baby-faced Beatles spent nine sun-kissed days in Miami Beach in 1964, basking in the warm winter as thousands of young fans thronged to catch a glimpse of the four Liverpool lads enjoying a bit of freedom on the ocean shore.

They stayed at the grand Deauville Beach Resort on Collins Avenue, and it was their live “Ed Sullivan Show” broadcast to 70 million people from the hotel’s Napoleon Ballroom — after their debut show in New York — that helped cement the Beatles’ extraordinary popularity in the United States, and the Deauville’s status as a South Florida cultural landmark.In its heyday, the hotel hosted the likes of Sammy Davis Jr., President John F. Kennedy, Frank Sinatra. The Deauville was unmistakable, greeting visitors with a dramatic porte-cochère fashioned of parabolic curves over the driveway entrance, a feature of its postwar-modernist architectural style. On the sign out front, a star dotted the letter “i” in its name. It looked like something out of “The Jetsons,” embodying the promise of the future.Today, the Deauville is shuttered, enclosed by an ugly chain-link fence and No Trespassing signs. Soon, it is likely to be demolished, to the shock and disgust of preservationists, who fear the hotel’s slow demise will set a troubling precedent in their efforts to protect South Florida’s history.

“We’re talking about saving trinkets from the building, which is pathetic,” Jack Finglass, the outgoing chairman of the Miami Beach Historic Preservation Board, said at a meeting last week. “This is an absolute horror.Miami Beach owes its iconic status in no small part to the preservation of its Art Deco district, known the world over for the string of pastel-colored boutique hotels with names like the Colony and the Delano that line Ocean Drive and Collins Avenue in South Beach.“South Florida i