Tower Theater
1508 SW Eighth Street,
Miami,
FL
33135
1508 SW Eighth Street,
Miami,
FL
33135
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I have wonderful memories of the Tower Theater…we lived just a few blocks away in the 50s and I remember the magical light blue neon tower in the night sky from our back yard. Later, I went to Saturday mantinees…two features, cartoon and serial for (I think) 15 cents. It was a special time in a special place. After the movies we would go to the nearby Royal Castle for hamburgers and birch beer….the hobby shop … the camera store and Green’s Drug Store. China City, Miami’s best Chinese restauarnt, was right there too. Across the street there was a gas station (PURE??) that had a monkey in a cage on the property …. Down the street was the Puritan Ice Cream Store with the best hot fudge sundaes (21 cents) that were ever created! Ah…the good ol' days.
ClaudiaO
Does anybody know anything about a former Strand Theatre in Miami?
One morning while communting from my home in Hollywood down to my job in Coral Gables, I decided to avoid the terrible traffic on I-95 and find some avenue that ran parallel to the interstate. And somewhere between NW 29th Street and NW 14th Street along NW 7th Avenue I found a small theatre with a marquee and classic double doors. It was labeled the STRAND with the S having fallen off some time ago. It currently seems to be a small church/prayer home now. I will try to take some pictures of it. Can anybody here identify what part of town/neighborhood we would call this area? It’s definitely industrial and very poor. Perhaps that might help with some research (where I’m finding NO luck).
Quick shot of the Tower in video news footage during the doc “COCAINE COWBOYS”.
I beg to differ.
This is no “cosmopolitan gentrified” Harlem neighborhood. Domino park has been the gathering spot for politicised anti-Castro retirees for years including many Bay of Pig veterans and more recently, anti-Sadinista activists.
I see no shame in this fact as many Miami exiles share those feelings. Most recently the center of this movement has moved to the younger and more vocal crowds that hang out at the popular Versailles Restaurant on Calle Ocho and 36th Street. Even president Bush has visited that location where effigies of Castro and Chavez have been burned.
I grew up in this neighborhood and am a Cuban-American and that park helped define the Tower’s audience for years. Movies from Cuba were not welcomed at the Tower although they play other South Florida neighborhoods without incident.
“anti-Castro conclave”? Good Lord.
It’s not incorrect, but I must say, it’s rather like mentioning the Apollo theatre as being in the neighbourhood of ‘the throttlingly strident black community’. I mean, please. And I’m not even Cuban…
Anyway, I attended a showing of “East/West” (Est-Ouest) by Régis Wargnier back in 1999 at the Tower, just when it had re-opened controversially, as mentioned above.
A story of White Russian emigrés being duped to return to their homeland, now Soviet Russia, and suffering horrors upon horrors once there, played well in the crowd of elderly Cuban ladies and gentlemen, in the theatre that evening.
At the time, everything was renovated, and had a very clean, even soignée look to it (though the concessions stand was amateurish, at best), so I had high hopes it would stay the course.
Unfortunately, it has not, and the last time I passed by it, its art nouveau lines were obscured by its depressed Little Havana (more like Little Tegucigalpa these days…) surroundings.
I do see in Lost Memory’s recent photograph, that Miami-Dade CC (as I still call it), must have been sponsoring a Spanish-language show of some kind, as late as December 2006. Good deal.
The Tower opened in the late twenties and was given the art deco treatment when it became a Wometco house in the early thirties.
The Tower is listed in the 1934 Year Book of Motion Pictures as having 750 seats.
I believe that this is the Tower in Miami (calle ocho = 8th street):
http://www.pbase.com/image/26961618