A Miami taxi driver was asked to show a passenger something fancy and fun, drove him to South Beach, and the passenger bought the building.
How it began
Alden Freeman, heir to a Standard Oil treasurer, built Casa Casuarina in 1930 on Ocean Drive, in Mediterranean Revival, modelled on the Alcázar de Colón in Santo Domingo — with brick he had brought from that house incorporated into it. He lived in the top-floor corner apartment and let the other twenty-three to his friends. He died there in 1937, and it was sold to Jacques Amsterdam for a hundred thousand dollars and run as the Amsterdam Palace.
The taxi
Versace arrived in Miami in 1992 on his way to Cuba and asked a cab driver to show him something fancy and fun. The driver took him to South Beach. Donatella’s account is exact: *Gianni just stopped in front of the building and said, I want this house. But it wasn’t a house; it was an apartment building, and people were living in it.* He bought it for 2.95 million dollars, then paid 3.7 million for the Revere Hotel next door in order to demolish it — against the Miami Design Preservation League — and spent three years and more than 30 million turning twenty-four apartments into ten suites, a new wing and a fifty-four-foot pool lined with over a million mosaic tiles, thousands of them 24-carat gold. The Medusa at the bottom was made in Calabria, broken up and shipped to Miami in numbered pieces.
⚑ And what happened on the steps
Gianni Versace was murdered on the front steps of this house on 15 July 1997, aged fifty. He had lived here five years. The Library records it because the house cannot be described without it and because what followed depends on it: the property changed hands several times and was bought by the Nakash family of Jordache for 41.5 million dollars in October 2013. **It is now a hotel of ten suites, with a restaurant in the courtyard.**
Why it is in the Library
It is not a Palazzo Versace — LHL-004 Palazzo Versace has never had anything to do with it, and the distinction matters. This is a private house that became a hotel because of what happened at its door, and its front steps are the most photographed spot in Miami Beach. The register holds it as a house in its own right, next to the brand rather than inside it.
What this model does not solve
A hotel whose principal asset is a murder is selling something it cannot name in its own marketing, and does not try to. The Library states the fact plainly rather than in the euphemism the trade prefers — *steeped in history and tragedy* — because a reference work that will not say what happened is not a reference work.