The party houses in the bay survived storms and sin. Does Stiltsville have a future?
It’s been Miami’s own Oz for nearly a century. Not an Emerald City, but a skyline of ramshackle wooden lodges rising from the emerald waters. Amid Biscayne Bay’s shallow flats, Stiltsville beckons people looking for an escape, and maybe a good party.
The wood-frame houses, surrounded by water, are built on concrete and steel pilings driven into the seagrass beds just a few feet below. But really, they’re built on dreams.
This is a place woven into the city’s fabric, a star of “Miami Vice,” both real and on TV. Maybe you have heard some of the stories that happened here. Maybe you have frolicked around Stiltsville homes. Even as the parties have become more like old-timer picnics and family getaways in recent years, the Miami landmark carries ghosts, tied to the city’s image of rogue revelers, secret smugglers and salty fishermen.
Despite the raucous reputation, there is silence now on a recent morning. Tourists paddle by. Dozens of spotted eagle rays speed by just below the water’s surface. A group barbecues lunch. But if you think back hard enough, you can almost see the action of decades past at the Bikini Club, the city’s movers and shakers kicking back with a drink and a few other diversions in the middle of the bay.
“It’s a neat thing that they’re keeping it here as kind of a preserve for people to come and look at,” said Bill Steitzer, as he and his wife kayaked by one of the houses. The couple were staying near Stiltsville on their 38-foot sailboat they came down on from their home in Jacksonville.
But Stiltsville is at a crossroads. The number of houses, once more than two dozen, is dwindling. Earlier this month, one of the seven survivors burned almost to the water. The village in the bay has actually been slowly disappearing for decades. And because the bay bottom on which it sits is owned by the National Park Service, rebuilding is a bureaucratic challenge, if possible at all.
The array of rustic homes about a mile out in the tropical lagoon from the Cape Florida Lighthouse on Key Biscayne can be an odd site for those approaching by boat the first time.
“You won’t find this probably anywhere else,” said Paul George, resident historian at HistoryMiami museum. He has given guided tours of Stiltsville for 30 years. “Each house has its own story.”
And what stories.
History on the water
For the people who tend to the homes, Stiltsville is a South Florida treasure worth preserving.
“This community of campsites built over water upon concrete and wood pilings has been culturally significant to South Florida for almost 100 years,” Duff W. Mattson III of the Stiltsville Trust said in a statement following the Jan. 11 fire that destroyed one of the seven remaining homes. It was known as the Leshaw house.
The Stiltsville Trust is a nonprofit group that has an agreement with Biscayne National Park to maintain the homes in the village. Anyone who wants to visit has to get permission from the trust.
Miami went through an early building boom and a mid-1920s hurricane when the ramshackle houses started to pop from the bay. Stiltsville’s pioneers include a guy known as Crawfish Eddie. Then there was a Beatnik con man whose real name was Harry Churchville. But he was known as Pierre to those who frequented his risque club built out of a large yacht that had run aground on the flats, George said.
Bertram Joseph “Chico” Goldsmith Jr., one of the caretakers of the house destroyed by the recent fire, has been going to Stiltsville since the ’60s. For Goldsmith, 78, the community was never so much a party place, but somewhere to get away for a quiet weekend with his wife and children, and now his grandchildren.
“A typical weekend now is I go out there with my wife, pack food in a cooler and have lunch on the water and watch the boats go by,” Goldsmith said. “Sometimes my kids spend the night out there, and the sound of the fish in the water is relaxing.”
The roaring ‘20s
The community’s origins go back to the late 1920s when the first shack was built as a bait business to cater to the throngs of sport anglers hunting the variety of fish in the bay. The structures, as many as 27 at Stiltsville’s peak, were built on either side of the Biscayne channel dredged by Henry Flagler, Standard Oil founder, and more well-known in Florida as the founder of the Florida East Coast Railway and the first and last train to Key West.
The channel is the only waterway deep enough for boats to navigate the otherwise shallow bay, George said. The waterway predates Government Cut, built in 1905. Flagler used it to run his steamboats from the Miami River out to the deepwater Atlantic on their way to the Bahamas, Havana and Key West.
“The home builders apparently treat the 14-foot channel as their highway to enter the Stiltsville area,” the historian said. “Some moved their boats to their homes by using the finger channels coming off the Biscayne channel. The channel is simply the only deep water element in an otherwise very shallow area.”
“Crawfish Eddie” Walker built the first structure, a shack, in the 1930s to sell bait and beer, according to a history of the community written by Lloyd Miller.
Miller, who died in August at the age of 100, was a champion of the Biscayne Bay environment and was instrumental in the creation of Biscayne National Park in 1980.
The Quarterdeck Club
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In 1939, a man named Commodore Edward Turner built a structure on barges and pilings, founding what became the Quarterdeck Club.
“The club became a fashionable trysting place, featuring a bar, dining rooms, bridge deck and game room,” George wrote in a 1992 article. The Quarterdeck lasted until it was destroyed in a 1961 fire.
A hurricane in 1950 destroyed “Crawfish” Eddie’s shack and damaged the Quarterdeck Club. By the late ’50s, there were 27 houses in Stiltsville. Hurricane Donna in 1960 took out 20 of them. Miller said eight were rebuilt.
By this time, Stiltsville’s reputation as an on-the-water party spot had been solidified. In 1962, a large 152-foot yacht called Jeff grounded on the flats. On it, the man known as Pierre opened the Biscayne Bay Bikini Club.
“Pierre offered club members (the membership fee was $1.00 per person) alcoholic beverages, state rooms for private trysts, and a sundeck for nude sunbathing,” George wrote. “Rumors of wild parties and photographs of beautiful, bikini-clad women found their way into the newspapers and became the staple of many happy hour conversations, causing the business of the Bikini Club to grow exponentially.”
The place was so popular that Pierre needed more space. So he grounded a surplus U.S. Navy P.T. boat next to the yacht.
“In 1964, Pierre claimed, with some hyperbole, 1,300 members for the Bikini Club,” George wrote.
But Pierre never purchased a state liquor license, and police arrested him and four of his employees at the club a year later. He was also arrested on charges of possessing 40 undersized Florida spiny lobsters, according to George.
The Bikini Club was no more.
Destruction and rebuilding
But things didn’t stay quiet for long at Stiltsville.
That same year, on Labor Day, Hurricane Betsy, with 120 mph winds and 11 feet of storm surge, destroyed or significantly damaged Stiltsville structures. New county building codes in the wake of the storm mandated that any new homes rebuilt had to withstand 120 mph winds and be elevated at least 10 feet above the waterline at high tide.
Eight more Stiltsville homes were built despite the new regulations, George said. Seventeen others survived the storm, but some had significant damage and couldn’t be rebuilt. The state allowed those with less than 50% damage to remain, but they had to be elevated onto pilings, according to Miller’s writings. Combined with the eight new homes, there were now 25 Stiltsville houses.
As the shores of Biscayne Bay filled with residential homes, complaints began to pile up about the offshore party spot. Owners of the Stiltsville homes at the time were leasing the bay bottom from the state, George said. But in 1976, the National Park Service asked Florida to look into the phased withdrawal of the leases, according to Miller.
Regular people
With the creation of Biscayne National Park in 1980, Stiltsville was now within the newly formed 181,000-acre protected area. In 1983, the Park Service mandated all the remaining structures be razed by 1999, George, the Miami historian, said. The state deeded the bay bottom to the park in 1985.
In 1992, Hurricane Andrew destroyed six Stiltsville homes, leaving seven, a number that would hold until this year’s fire.
Then, 1999 came and went without the homes being torn down by the Park Service. Four years later, an agreement was reached with Biscayne National Park and the trust. The homes would be preserved “so they can help showcase the richness of the park’s marine resources,” according to the park.
While Stiltsville’s tales of wild parties and characters abound, it’s also been a community of like-minded regular Miami folks who like to spend weekends fishing, swimming and hanging out in the splendor of Biscayne Bay. Owners have included businessmen, lawyers and judges, and a group of blue-collar workers who started the Miami Springs Powerboat Club in the 1950s, according to the Stiltsville Trust.
The club’s house still thrives today. On a recent afternoon, club members barbecued lunch for a Miami-Dade Fire Rescue boat crew.
From the ashes
One well-known judge who frequented Stiltsville was Francis X. Knuck, of the 11th Judicial Circuit of Miami-Dade County. Knuck, who died in 2004 at the age of 84, was one of the owners of the Leshaw house, the home that burned down this month.
“It sits on the edge of Stiltsville. Though, not as imposing as some of the other homes, it afforded a comfortable perch for Judge Knuck to enjoy the bait fish streaming in the waters below,” George said.
Mattson said the Trust is hoping the Park Service will allow the Leshaw house to be rebuilt.
“Stiltsville Trust, its board members, and the stilt home caretakers are all saddened by this tragic event, and will be working collaboratively together with Biscayne National Park to explore the very likely possibility of rebuilding the affected Stiltsville site,” Mattson said. “This effort will hopefully result in preservation of the entire Stiltsville community as we have known it since Hurricane Andrew in 1992, for many generations to come.”
Danielle Cessna, chief of interpretation and education at Biscayne National Park, said that decision won’t be made until after the investigation into the fire is completed.
“Once we have the report,‘’ Cessna said, “we will talk to the Stiltsville Trust Inc. and determine next steps.”
Meanwhile, for now, the remaining houses of Stiltsville survive in the bay, hosting the occasional party or picnic.
The environment is ideal for adventurous children, said Goldsmith, one of the caretakers. They can swim off the docks attached to the homes, and on low tides, walk around and explore the flats where it’s not unusual to find conch lying in the sand.
“My kids did it,” he said, ”and my grandkids do it now.”’
This story was originally published January 29, 2021 at 1:06 PM.
