10/12/2026
A mile out in Biscayne Bay there are houses standing in four feet of open water. Nobody lives in them. Nobody owns them. And you can book one for the day. 🏖️
It started in the early 1930s with a man they called Crawfish Eddie Walker, who built a shack on a grounded barge and sold bait, b**r and a crawfish chowder he called chilau. At its peak around 1960 there were twenty seven buildings out on the flats. The Quarterdeck Club opened in November 1940, invitation only, a hundred and fifty dollars to join, run by a former wh**ky salesman. Life magazine put it in print that February and called it a hundred thousand dollar play palace, with a bar, a bridge deck and dock slips. All of it in four feet of water, a mile from the nearest road.
Then came the Bikini Club, out of a grounded hundred and fifty foot yacht, with dollar memberships and free drinks for women in bikinis on the sun deck. State beverage agents shut it down in the mid sixties. There had already been a wh**ky arrest in 1943 and a slot machine raid after that. 🍹
But what finally thinned it out was the weather. Betsy wrecked most of it in September 1965 and they rebuilt anyway. Then Andrew came through on August 24, 1992 and left seven houses standing, not one of them from the glory days. The leases expired July 1, 1999 with a federal order to demolish, and seventy five thousand people signed their names to save them. Six are still out there, since one burned in 2021, held by a trust for the Park Service, and anybody at all can apply for a day. 🌅
