However, when the CRA Program ended in 1974, the Freedom Tower began a long period of uncertainty. It was the entryway for a new population who would transform Miami from a Southern resort town to an international metropolis powered by Latin American immigrants-a new kind of American city. It became known to some as the “Ellis Island of the South,” a symbol to Cuban refugees of the American ideals of liberty and democracy, and the welcome of their new country. Where the News Tower had been a monument to a new city, the Freedom Tower became a landmark for a different era in Miami. At the place that Cuban exiles dubbed El Refugio (The Refuge), hundreds of thousands of Cuban refugees received financial aid, food, medical care, and crucial help in establishing a new life. In 1962, it became the Freedom Tower, the center for the new federal Cuban Refugee Assistance Program, created to aid the thousands of Cubans fleeing the 1959 communist revolution. The News moved out in 1957, opening the building’s next chapter. The Miami News became the city’s leading paper and a flagship in the growing Cox media chain, tackling notorious gangster and Miami resident Al Capone, governmental corruption, and civil rights, and winning multiple Pulitzer Prizes. The 1926 hurricane that devastated Miami, along with its initial boom, left the building with an alarming thirty-three-degree tilt. It towered over the city center on the edge of Biscayne Bay, where the terminus of the Florida East Coast Railway met the Port of Miami-the meeting point of the city’s key transport systems. It was a grand structure meant to impress, to proclaim a major institution in a striving new city-a monument to what Miami would become.Ĭompleted in 1925, the 289-foot-high Tower (briefly the tallest building in the South) was Miami’s lodestar, so tall that ships used it to navigate. The home of Cox’s newspaper was no mere functional office building. (Schultze and Weaver designed two other famous early Miami buildings, the Miami Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables and the Roney Plaza Hotel in Miami Beach, also based on the Giralda.) The firm modeled the Miami News Tower on the Giralda bell tower of the cathedral of Seville in Spain, with an elaborate mix of Moorish and Spanish and Italian Baroque elements in the Mediterranean Revival style, a fantastical architectural mix that dominated early Miami. James Middleton Cox, a former Ohio congressman, governor, and presidential candidate lured to Miami in 1923 by pioneering Miami Beach developer Carl Fisher, constructed the Tower to house his newly purchased newspaper, The Miami Daily News and Metropolis (soon to become The Miami News).Ĭox hired a prestigious New York architectural firm, Schultze and Weaver, responsible for luxury landmarks such as New York’s Waldorf-Astoria (1931), The Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach (1926), and the Hotel Sevilla-Biltmore in Havana (1924). The Freedom Tower was built, like much of Miami, by an ambitious businessman and civic leader, eager to join in creating a new city.
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