The velvet ropes are long gone. The bunnies, longer.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But the room where Sammy Davis Jr., Ray Charles and the Supremes once stopped Miami Beach cold is back on the market. And for $6.5 million, someone\u2019s about to get one of the most storied entertainment assets in South Florida for the price of a decent Brickell condo.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The former Playboy Theater at 5445 Collins Ave. is officially for sale, a 26,000-square-foot relic of Miami Beach\u2019s loudest, most unapologetic era tucked inside the Castle Beach Club tower on the Mid-Beach waterfront.\u00a0It\u2019s being pitched for a rare redevelopment play.<\/p>\n
The price has already been cut by $1.5 million. The brokers have already been swapped. And yet the pitch remains the same: You can\u2019t build this anymore.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The long-shuttered Playboy Theater at 5445 Collins Ave. has hit the market for $6.5 million after a steep price cut. Courtesy Fausto Commercial<\/p>\n
The owners hunt for a buyer willing to resurrect the roughly 26,000-square-foot oceanfront venue that boasts a glam history. Alamy Stock Photo<\/p>\n
They\u2019re right. You can\u2019t.\u00a0<\/p>\n
When Playboy Enterprises dropped millions into the Castle Hotel in 1970, transforming it into the Playboy Plaza Hotel and club, it wasn\u2019t just building a nightclub \u2014 it was staking a claim on Miami Beach\u2019s jet-set identity at the exact moment that identity was being invented.\u00a0<\/p>\n
What followed was the kind of era that gets mythologized: packed houses, celebrity residencies, the sort of room where music, money and spectacle collided nightly and no one thought to document it because it felt like it would last forever. It didn\u2019t. But the bones certainly did.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Once a centerpiece of the Playboy Plaza Hotel\u2019s swinging \u201960s era, the cavernous, triple-level space has sat dormant for years, but is now being pitched as a rare redevelopment play. Courtesy Fausto Commercial<\/p>\n
The theater remains in remarkable condition. Courtesy of Fausto Commercial<\/p>\n
The theater later reinvented itself as the Hirschfeld Theatre, pulling in Broadway touring productions \u2014 Phantom of the Opera, Evita, 42nd Street \u2014 before eventually going dark again.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Gloria Estefan filmed her \u201cHotel Nacional\u201d music video there on the way out, which is either a graceful farewell or a sign the place has more lives than anyone\u2019s counting.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Today the interior is stripped to the studs. The finishes are gone. The glory is gone. What remains is the curvature of the balconies, the depth of the stage and roughly 26,000 square feet of grandfathered entertainment zoning that a hospitality lawyer would describe, quietly, as irreplaceable. That\u2019s the bet.<\/p>\n
Playboy Club members arriving at the theater in the 1960s. Alamy Stock Photo<\/p>\n
With its massive scale and \u201cgrandfathered\u201d design, it offers a build-it-once advantage that today\u2019s zoning wouldn\u2019t allow. Courtesy Fausto Commercial<\/p>\n
Miami Beach has recently moved to loosen rules around live entertainment in the Mid-Beach corridor, potentially clearing a path for a high-end nightlife or hospitality concept to finally bring the storied theater back to life. Courtesy Fausto Commercial<\/p>\n
New York-based Top Rock Holdings has held the property since 2021.<\/p>\n
Miami Beach has spent years tightening zoning and capacity rules that make building a large-format venue from scratch a near-impossible proposition. The city is now quietly reversing course, rolling back restrictions along the Mid-Beach corridor specifically to lure live entertainment back to the stretch of Collins Avenue that sits in the dead zone between the chaos of South Beach and the sanitized luxury of Bal Harbour.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The timing, in other words, is not an accident.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Supper clubs, immersive experiences, hybrid performance-and-hospitality concepts \u2014 operators chasing the post-nightclub dollar are hunting for exactly the kind of space that doesn\u2019t exist anymore. This one does. Barely. But it does.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Playboy Theater isn\u2019t just a property \u2014 it\u2019s a piece of Miami Beach history with a pulse,\u201d Anne Mary Mairura of Fausto Commercial, who is co-listing the property with Tony Saladrigas, told The Post.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The velvet ropes are long gone. The bunnies, longer.\u00a0 But the room where Sammy Davis Jr., Ray Charles…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":208743,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[5752,2152,11504,28,74074,123,1642,125,124,95534,480,95535,93367,95536],"class_list":["post-208742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-miami","tag-commercial-real-estate","tag-development","tag-exclusive","tag-florida","tag-historic-buildings","tag-miami","tag-miami-beach","tag-miami-headlines","tag-miami-news","tag-playboy","tag-real-estate","tag-sammy-davis-jr","tag-surreal-estate","tag-the-supremes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=208742"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208742\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/208743"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=208742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=208742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=208742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}