OP-ED
Preserving Capone’s home isn’t glorifying a gangster. It’s saving Miami Beach history | Opinion
Nine decades after Florida officials tried to evict Al Capone from Miami Beach, local developers might finally finish the job. Todd Michael Glaser and Nelson Gonzalez, who own Capone’s former residence on Palm Island, now intend to demolish it.
Is this place — where Capone oversaw one of the most notorious mass killings in American history, partied with other criminals, and drew his last labored breaths as a 48-year-old victim of neurosyphilis — worth saving? Glaser says no. Making Capone’s home a protected historic structure, he told the Miami Herald, would “glorify this guy,” while turning the property into “a tourist attraction for a known felon.”
This argument misses the point of preserving the house, which tourists will keep looking for even if it’s torn down. Just ask Chicago. That city demolished most of the buildings associated with Capone’s career — from his headquarters in the Lexington Hotel to the location of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre — in an apparent attempt, as one official put it in 1967, to forget things “we’d rather not remember.”\
Yet tour buses keep rolling past those sites, and others that have become parking lots, because Capone’s place in American culture is bigger than brick and mortar. That’s why his Palm Island home should remain — not because a gangster lived and died there, but because his life and legend are embedded in our history.
The City Code of Miami Beach lists eight criteria for designating a historic building, any one of which should entitle it to protection. Capone’s home meets at least three.
PROHIBITION ERA
First, the house “embod[ies] the distinctive characteristics of a historical period” — the Prohibition era that made Capone a legend and changed the landscape of this region. When Capone bought the place in 1928, Miami was trying to recover from the failed Florida land boom. The area needed investment, so Mayor John Newton Lummus, Jr., not only welcomed Capone to Miami Beach — he helped the gangster acquire the Palm Island property. The energy of the Jazz Age can still be seen in the building’s Spanish stucco styling and Art Deco details.
The house easily meets a second criterion, that of “association with events that have made a significant contribution to the history of the city, the county, state or nation.” The decisions Capone made at Palm Island, at what the Miami Daily News called his “Summer White House,” echoed across the country — even as he tried to distance himself from them.
Capone made sure to be in Florida on February 14, 1929, the day his hired killers machine-gunned seven men back in Chicago. This event, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, shocked the country, proved Prohibition’s failure and marked a turning point for Capone, changing his public image from jovial bootlegger to coldblooded killer. Especially after the stock market crash later that year, Americans no longer looked kindly on his wealth — or how he’d made it. And by demonstrating the brutal efficiency of new automatic weapons, the massacre helped inspire the first federal gun control law in American history.
A third criterion for historic designation, that of “association with the lives of persons significant in the city’s past history,” also fits — even though Florida tried repeatedly to rid itself of Capone. In March 1930, Gov. Doyle E. Carlton issued an order banning him from the Sunshine State. When that failed, State Attorney Vernon Hawthorne sued to shutter the Palm Island house as a public nuisance, while local police arrested Capone on any pretext.
AMERICAN SOCIETY SHIFTS
But when Capone contested this treatment in court, his position in society became clear. Plenty of elite Miamians testified that Capone hosted disreputable characters and served bootleg liquor on Palm Island. But more than a few prominent citizens had also enjoyed his hospitality. Prohibition enabled Capone’s rapid rise to wealth, giving this son of Italian immigrants a shortcut around ethnic prejudice, but his ill-gotten gains couldn’t purchase his neighbors’ respect. His presence on Palm Island represented a larger shift in American society, the arrival of new money increasingly challenging the authority of the old.
“I wanted a home,” Capone said. “I bought one. And what happens? They tell me I’m not wanted. Yet they take my money. … What do they want me to do? Get an airplane and live up in the clouds?”
Capone voiced these complaints to Miami publisher Fred Girton, who recorded them in Startling Detective magazine 90 years ago this month. The article described Girton’s latest visit to Palm Island, from the expensive furnishings to the golden tableware guests used to enjoy Capone’s sumptuous meals.
This conspicuous consumption, emblematic of the Roaring Twenties, seemed obscene in the Depression. The public would not stand for it. Neither would the federal government.
CAPONE CONVICTED
President Herbert Hoover, who’d spent the winter of 1929 across Biscayne Bay from Capone, made the gangster’s downfall a priority. The Treasury Department documented Capone’s huge expenditures — with help from Girton, who informed them of his host’s “lavish mode of living…at his Miami Beach home.” Such evidence led to Capone’s conviction for income tax evasion in October 1931, brought down by the excess on display at Palm Island.
When he died there in 1947, the Miami Daily News called his life an indictment of American society: “Only because we were as we were, could Al Capone be as Al Capone was.”
That’s precisely why his home deserves saving. We might be ashamed of its history, but it tells the story of a bloody, greedy era whose failures we often seem intent on repeating.
Miami Beach can’t erase that history, but it can preserve and contextualize it for visitors and future generations. Or it can repeat Chicago’s mistakes. Capone’s legend will live on either way.
A. Brad Schwartz is a doctoral candidate in American history at Princeton University and the co-author (with Max Allan Collins) of “Scarface and the Untouchable: Al Capone, Eliot Ness, and the Battle for Chicago.”
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