At long last, the book South Beach: Stories of a Renaissance has arrived and is now available for purchase!  This is a very exciting time for Dragonfly Expeditions and Charles J. Kropke especially – Charles is an accomplished storyteller and now a published author with his first book showcasing the great resort we call South Beach!

The launch party for “South Beach: Stories of a Renaissance” is on February 17^th, 2011 at 7pm, at Books and Books, 927 Lincoln Road, on Miami Beach. Signed copies of the book will be available for purchase that evening.  Please join us as we congratulate Charles for a job well done!

For more information about the book and where it can be purchased,
please contact Trish Ellington at 305-401-8184

Please enjoy an excerpt from the story of the Brown’s Hotel (the home of Prime 112):

“South Beach’s very first hotel certainly couldn’t be compared to the architecturally distinct masterpieces that would rise on Miami Beach in the decades to come.  It was a simple wooden affair that purposefully filled the entire, long, narrow residential lot purchased by the hotel’s founder, William J. Brown in 1914.  In fact, with its sturdy Dade County Pine framing and practical vernacular design, Browns Hotel, originally called the Atlantic Beach Hotel, looks something more like a stage piece for an old Western movie set than a resort hotel in America’s new tropical playground.

William Brown, a Scottish immigrant and plumber by trade saw an opportunity where others had only made promises.  Although he was financially only able to build on the most modest of scales, Brown beat the great developers Carl Fisher, John Collins, Thomas Pancoast and the Lummus Brothers to the starting line for Miami Beach’s first hotel.

Interestingly, either Brown was a brilliant pitchman or a skillful fabricator.  He claimed that when he began to construct the foundation for his hotel he came upon the skeleton of an old, 125 foot ship buried beneath the sand.  Speculation was that it was an old Spanish Galleon or pirate ship that some long ago hurricane had driven up onto the beach.  Since he couldn’t afford to excavate the ship, he claimed to have built the hotel right over the wreck.  Surely, after the hotel’s foundation was built over top the still intact ship below no one would be able to dispute Brown’s claim.  It probably made for a great story to tell early guests of the hotel.  As fate would have it, Brown made an oversight that no one could have anticipated.  Eventually, his hotel would be picked up and moved so that his engaging claim could be substantiated.  But, let’s not jump ahead of our story…”

Information about the launch party for “South Beach: Stories of a Renaissance” is available on the Books and Books event webpage.