Images of National Hotel on Miami Beach

Photographs of the historic 14-story Art Deco designed National Hotel at 1677 Collins Avenue on Miami Beach.

Cover: Postcard of the National Hotel, front and back, in 1940 when it opened. Courtesy of Florida State Archives.

Nestled between the Delano and Sagamore Hotels on Miami Beach is the historic National Hotel at 1677 Collins Avenue. The cover photograph is a postcard of the 14-story building, showcasing the front façade and back of the hotel, within a year of its opening in the early 1940s. One of the most distinctive features of the edifice is the cupola at the top of the structure, along with many other traditional characteristics of the Art Deco design pattern. The hotel consisted of 109 rooms and a three-bedroom penthouse when it first opened.

The inn was conceived and financed by Harry Koretsky, founder of the Brightstar Flashlight & Battery Company in Jersey City, New Jersey, who moved to Miami Beach in 1932 and began investing in real estate to construct hotels to meet the demand of winter tourism during the latter part of the 1930s. Prior to constructing the National Hotel, Koretsky owned the Grand National Hotel on Miami Beach, but sold it in April of 1940 for $117,500 to help finance the development of the National Hotel.

The pictures seen in Figures 1 & 2 provide a rare glimpse of two rooms found within the hotel photographed in October of 1941, within a year of its opening. The hotel was designed by renowned architect Roy France, and was constructed near the end of the Art Deco design era on Miami Beach.

Figure 1: Room in the National Hotel on October 22, 1941. Courtesy of Miami-Dade Public Library, Romer Collection.

The project was started in July of 1940 and was finished prior to the end of that same year at an estimated cost of $500,000. The hotel opened in December in time for the 1940 – 41 winter season. Within two years of opening, the structure was turned over to the Army Air Corp as an administrative building during World War II when the military took over much of South Florida to support the war effort.

The edifice is still standing along Collins Avenue and is a member of the Historic Hotels of America program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. It was fully renovated in 2022 during the closure of the hotel due to the Covid pandemic.

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Figure 2: Bedroom inside the National Hotel on October 8, 1941. Courtesy of the Miami-Dade Public Library, Romer Collection.