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

August 3, 2016

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.