Opa-locka: Glenn Curtiss and the City of a Thousand and One Nights
Near Miami, Florida
If you drive into Opa-locka, you will see domes. You will see minarets. You will see Moorish arches and ornamental towers and street signs reading Ali Baba Avenue, Scheherazade Boulevard, Aladdin Street, and Sultan Avenue. You will think you have taken a wrong turn somewhere.
You have not. This is exactly what Glenn Curtiss intended.
Curtiss was one of the most important figures in early American aviation. He built the first aircraft to take off from water, won the first international air race, and eventually built the Curtiss JN-Four trainer, known as the Jenny, which taught most American pilots to fly during the First World War. He was also a real estate developer, and in nineteen twenty-five he turned his attention to a patch of land north of Miami.
Curtiss had been reading the nineteen oh seven edition of One Thousand and One Nights, the Arabian Nights collection, with illustrations by the French artist Edmund Dulac. He decided to build a city that looked like those illustrations. He hired architect Bernhardt Muller, who drew up plans for one hundred and five buildings, all of them in the Moorish Revival style, all of them with domes, minarets, decorative arches, and elaborate ornamentation. The streets were named for characters from the stories.
Opa-locka was chartered on May fourteenth, nineteen twenty-six, by twenty-eight registered voters. Curtiss built a hotel, a zoo, a golf course, an airport, and a train station. He wanted a completely self-contained city built around a single aesthetic vision.
Opa-locka was largely spared by the September hurricane of nineteen twenty-six, though the Florida land boom collapsed soon after. The development stalled. Curtiss died in nineteen thirty. Most of the roughly one hundred original buildings were eventually lost to neglect or demolition.
But twenty of them survive, and they are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Opa-locka City Hall still stands with its domes and minarets intact, one of the most singular pieces of civic architecture in the United States, in a city that exists because a pilot loved a storybook.
