Overtaken But Not Forgotten

That badly-shot picture above is the view from my hotel room in Miami last week, where I was participating in some pre-conference work for the APTI. That’s the bay-front skyline of downtown Miami, with the foot of Biscayne Boulevard in the foreground. The building I want to talk about is there, but a little hard to see, so I’ll blow it up:

That’s the 1925 headquarters of the Miami News, now known as the Freedom Tower. I believe it was the first skyscraper in the city, as the Miami-Dade County Courthouse wasn’t completed until a few years later. The new high-rises around it make it look almost like a toy, but it used to be a major presence on the city’s skyline:

What I found most interesting about it is that it was built by the George Fuller company and designed by the architects Schultze & Weaver, both located in New York. This is not particularly surprising: the steel-frame skyscraper was still a relatively new building type in 1925 and required specialized knowledge. One of the common forms of technology transfer is for specialists to travel to a new location and train people there. It’s entirely possible that the local AEC firms in Miami at that time did not have the ability to construct this building, a situation that changed not long after.

In any case, it’s nice to see this building survive and remain in use, even as its stature changed from tallest in the city to a cute relic.