South Beach’s Deco Firestone Station Becoming 24-Hour Diner

Photo by Phillip Pessar.

The streamline moderne service station on the corner of 16th & Alton Road has been a Firestone Tire auto shop continuously since its construction in 1939 until the present day. Well, actually until earlier this year when it finally closed, and its iconic flame red ‘Firestone’ sign came down for restoration. Happily the sign’s back up, and new owners, the Menin/Galbut family of Crescent Heights Development, are restoring and adaptively using the entire building to make it the all-the-time neighborhood diner and watering hole it was always meant to be. Family scion and diner proprietor Keith Menin stood told the Real Deal the 24-hour diner will be called Al’s Diner (and not Keith’s Diner, apparently, even though  he’s planning on running it himself) and will serve a wide variety of food. It sounds like it could be a neighborhood mainstay, an ol’ reliable type of place where you can probably find something you’ll like whenever you like it. Two additional retail spaces will be available for other tenants as well.

Menin stood before the city’s design review board yesterday, reported the Real Deal as well. to receive a series of variances that:

“will allow for the facility to be converted into a mixed-use retail/restaurant development with outdoor café seating, a take-out window on 16th Street, and the installation of a “super graphic” on what is now a blank wall facing east. The adaptive reuse of the building calls for subdividing the structure into three separate spaces for commercial tenants, opening up the northern wall along 16th Street with large windows and adding a new one-story addition to the building. Auto pull-up areas will be converted into outdoor café seating with extensive trellising.”

Plans and elevation are below.

1212 Lincoln Mixed-Use Project Gets Approved at Galbut’s Prized Lincoln-Alton Property

Developer Russell Galbut, the developer and ‘big man in charge’ at his development firm Crescent Heights, probably controls more Alton Road frontage than any single other individual, and he’s working on a series of infill developments that eventually may change the face of the street entirely. And that’s probably a good thing, because Alton from the Dade Canal south is really quite blah. You can already see construction bringing changes closer to 5th Street, Galbut also has a new Whole Foods Market in the works up on 19th and Alton, and now a redesigned and enlarged complex absorbing an entire block SW of the intersection with Lincoln (the previous design had been more angular). The project, which is being designed by two firms doing separate sections, Perkins+Will and Avroko, was just approved by the Miami Beach Design Review Board. This is primo, primo property, so Galbut is going all the way. The five story project includes a 447-space parking garage, a large food court functioning as a “common space” overlooking Alton Road,  a 100 guest room luxury hotel, and retail.

And yes, 1212 Lincoln is obviously a riff on 1111 Lincoln, the famous parking garage catercorner to it across the intersection.

Real Deal goes more in depth.

Construction is Transforming the ‘Entrance’ to Miami Beach, Around a Hostile Intersection in Need of Change Too

Photos by Sean McCaughan.

Multiple construction projects just north of the intersection of 5th Street and Alton Road are transforming the face of the street in that area, from a series underutilized and neglected lots near the prime entrance to Miami Beach to an attractively urban cityscape. The obtuse intersection however, notable for its flyover from the MacArthur Causeway and hostility to pedestrians, has yet to follow with a makeover. I almost died taking the photo above.

On the east side of Alton, at 6th Street, the very attractively designed Urban Box Self Storage (how often is self storage sexy, really?) is well under construction. North of it, developers Crescent Heights (which is dominating new developing all along Alton with a series of quite fetchingly designed buildings) are building a new healthcare center for Baptist Hospital. Construction has already broken ground on that. Last, and by far the biggest, Crescent Heights is clearing and gutting two entire blocks it owns between 5th and 7th on the west side of Alton while lobbying the city for permission to construct a 300-foot tower on the land in exchange for building a new mass transit hub in the base. Until then, a 7-11 still sits splat in the middle of his land even though the convenience store’s old parking lot is half buried under the mountain of an elevated street.

In five years, and again in ten, the main entrance to Miami Beach is destined to look very different than today.