Miami Dedicates Its Skyscraper Courthouse

September 6, 1928 — Thousands of people gathered in downtown Miami for the formal dedication of the new Dade County Courthouse, a towering government building that announced how quickly South Florida had changed.

Only a generation earlier, Miami had been a small frontier community. By the late 1920s, the city was growing at a pace that overwhelmed earlier public buildings and demanded something much larger.

The answer rose at Flagler Street and Northwest First Avenue: a courthouse and government center that climbed hundreds of feet above downtown and became one of the most recognizable buildings in Florida.

A County That Had Outgrown Its Courthouse

Dade County's government had moved with the region's population. The county seat had been relocated permanently to Miami in 1899, and a courthouse completed in 1904 was expected to serve for decades.

It did not.

By the 1920s, South Florida's land boom and population surge had transformed Miami. Courts, records, administrative offices and public business demanded far more space than the earlier building could provide.

County leaders began planning a new courthouse in 1925.

Building the New Courthouse Around the Old One

The construction method itself became part of the building's legend.

Rather than simply clear the site and begin from an empty lot, builders erected the steel framework of the new courthouse around the older courthouse, which continued functioning inside the rising skeleton of its replacement.

The old courthouse was then dismantled from within as the new tower rose around it.

It was an extraordinary symbol of Miami's growth: the new city literally enclosing and replacing the smaller public building that had served the community only two decades earlier.

A Government Skyscraper

The new courthouse was designed by architect A. Ten Eyck Brown, with Miami architect August Geiger serving as associate architect.

The building was intended to house both Dade County government and the City of Miami. Courtrooms, judicial chambers, records, administrative offices, a law library and jail facilities were gathered into one enormous civic complex.

The tower rose approximately 336 feet above street level.

Contemporary accounts described it as one of the tallest municipal buildings in the United States and among the tallest structures in the South.

For Miami in 1928, it was more than an office building.

It was a declaration that the city expected to remain important.

September 6, 1928

The courthouse was formally dedicated on September 6, 1928.

Contemporary local histories report that more than 7,000 people attended the celebration. Visitors crowded into the building and rode elevators toward the observation levels high above downtown Miami.

The building reportedly cost approximately $4 million and contained twenty-eight stories.

From the upper floors, visitors could look across a city that had changed almost beyond recognition during the Florida land boom.

An Exact-Date Florida Memory Photograph

Florida Memory preserves an especially valuable record of the day.

Reference photograph RC03375 is dated September 6, 1928 and shows the newly completed Dade County Courthouse from the southwest.

Everything Under One Roof

The courthouse represented a new scale of public administration for South Florida.

County government, city offices, courts, records and jail facilities could operate within the same towering complex. The design reflected how rapidly Miami had evolved from a relatively small community into a major urban center.

The building also became a place where ordinary Floridians encountered government in its most direct forms: property records, court proceedings, licenses, criminal cases, civil disputes, marriages, public meetings and everyday administrative business.

Courtroom 6-1

One courtroom in particular became closely associated with the building's legal history.

Courtroom 6-1 opened with the courthouse in 1928 and later became the setting for several nationally known cases.

In 1930, gangster Al Capone was tried there on a perjury charge and acquitted.

In 1933, Giuseppe Zangara was sentenced after the shooting that had targeted President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt and fatally wounded Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak.

The courtroom also hosted later trials that attracted broad public attention, becoming one of the most historically significant judicial spaces in South Florida.

The Courthouse and the Boom

The courthouse opened at a complicated moment.

Miami's spectacular land boom was already collapsing.

The devastating hurricane of 1926 had damaged the city and undermined public confidence. Real-estate speculation was slowing, banks were under pressure and the national economy was moving toward the Great Depression.

Yet the courthouse remained.

A building conceived during the optimism of the boom became an institution that served Miami through the much harder years that followed.

A Landmark That Outlived the Era That Built It

Many boom-era projects vanished, changed uses or were demolished.

The Dade County Courthouse endured.

Its tower remained a familiar point on Miami's skyline long after taller private buildings surrounded it.

The structure continued functioning as a courthouse while the metropolitan region around it grew from hundreds of thousands of residents into millions.

In 1989, the building was added to the National Register of Historic Places, recognizing its importance to government, community development and architecture.

Restoring a Historic Courtroom

Time altered the building's interior.

Acoustic tile covered original ceilings. Historic wood floors were concealed. Woodwork was painted. Modern fixtures replaced earlier details.

Later restoration work in Courtroom 6-1 sought to return the room to its 1928 appearance, bringing back architectural features and courtroom furnishings that had been lost or obscured over the decades.

The restoration preserved not simply a handsome room but a working piece of Florida legal history.

A Young City Builds for the Future

The Dade County Courthouse tells a broader Florida story.

Florida cities repeatedly had to build ahead of themselves.

Population arrived quickly. Transportation systems expanded. Land was subdivided. Government institutions had to grow almost as fast as the communities they served.

Miami's 1928 courthouse was an extreme example of that phenomenon.

The city did not build a modest replacement.

It built vertically.

It built for courts, records, offices, prisoners and public administration on a scale that would have seemed extraordinary only a few years earlier.

September 6 in Florida History

On September 6, 1928, thousands of Floridians entered a new courthouse that towered above Miami.

They were standing inside a building created by one of the fastest periods of urban growth in Florida history.

The land boom would fade.

The skyline would rise far higher.

Dade County itself would eventually become Miami-Dade County.

But the courthouse remained.

Nearly a century later, the building still tells the story of the moment when Miami decided that its government buildings had to match the scale of the city it expected to become.

On September 6, 1928, Miami did not simply dedicate a courthouse. It dedicated a skyscraper to the future of South Florida.

Sources for Additional Reading

• Florida Memory — State Archives of Florida, RC03375 — Exact-date photograph of the Dade County Courthouse on September 6, 1928, by W. A. Fishbaugh.
• National Park Service — National Register of Historic Places — Official historic registration for the Dade County Courthouse.
• National Register Nomination Documentation — Architectural and governmental history of the courthouse.
• The Florida Bar — Preserving Our State's Legal Heritage — History and restoration of Courtroom 6-1.

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