History

Miami in 1926 was in the grip of its first great real estate boom, a period of explosive growth that had transformed a small railroad terminus city into a subtropical metropolis in less than two decades. The Florida East Coast Railway had reached Miami in 1896; Henry Flagler’s real estate developments had established the city’s street pattern and its early civic ambition; and the 1920s boom had brought speculative development, Mediterranean Revival architecture, and the aspirations of a city determined to become a world resort.

Into this environment John Eberson brought his most southern movie palace. The Austrian-born Eberson had developed the Atmospheric theater concept — theaters designed to feel like open-air courtyards in Spain, Italy, or the Islamic world — in the early 1920s, and the style had proven enormously popular with American audiences who found the experience of watching a film under a simulated night sky magical. The Olympia on Flagler Street was Eberson’s gift to Miami: a building whose Spanish Colonial exterior fit perfectly with the Mediterranean Revival aesthetic dominating the boom-era city, and whose interior transported audiences from the subtropical heat to an imaginary Spanish courtyard with a ceiling of projected stars.

The theater survived the collapse of the Florida land boom in 1926, the Great Depression, and the postwar shift to suburban cinemas, though not without difficulty. It closed as a commercial theater and was rescued by a preservation effort that brought the city of Miami and the philanthropist Maurice Gusman together to restore and operate it as a nonprofit cultural institution. The renamed Gusman Center has since become one of Miami’s most beloved cultural assets, host to the Miami Film Festival, classical music performances, and community programming that draws on the diverse populations of one of America’s most international cities.