Found video footage takes viewers back to Miami Beach and Coral Gables in 1926
People in 1926 Coral Gables and Miami Beach sure loved diving boards and massive pools.
Not that we don’t like our pools now — pandemic, not withstanding — but people nearly a hundred years ago sure knew how to get their inner Greg Louganis going.
We know this because we just viewed a revealing, 12-minute, black-andwhite video of South Florida in 1926 posted by California-based historian and film archivist Rick Helin.
Helin, who works for one of California’s oldest history organizations, The California Pioneers of Santa Clara County, sent the moving images of Florida to the Miami Herald.
The footage takes viewers into town by train along the Key West Extension — “the single greatest railroad engineering and construction feat in U.S. and, possibly, world history,” said South Florida historian and author Seth Bramson. He also noted scenes showing Long Key Viaduct, Long Key Fishing Camp and Bahia Honda bridge in the Keys.
We see a brand-new Biltmore Hotel, which opened that year. The nearby Venetian Pool and its coral rock diving tower are part of the journey, as are parts of a much-different Miami and Miami Beach.
Vintage moving images of 1926
The films were shot by Louis O. Normandin while he and his wife, Estelle, were on vacation in South Florida, Helin said. Normandin was the owner and operator of what is said to be one of America’s oldest known automobile dealerships in 1906 in California.
Normandin’s grandson, Paul Normandin, donated the moving images to Helin so that they can be shared digitally.
“We typically receive everything from old high school football games, also images of old vistas of fruit orchards that once encompassed our valley, old local wineries, iconic structures long destroyed,” Helin said in an email.
“Once in awhile, a few backyard birthday parties, trips to Disneyland, maybe a few Christmas morning unwrappings of presents will sneak into the mix. But, that goes with the territory,” he said.
“Then, every once in awhile we get some wonderful, historic reels from outside our geographic area. Instead of posting them on The Pioneer’s website reserved for local subjects, I have used my own personal site on YouTube to post these ‘out of the area’ gems,” he said.
Like Normandin’s Coral Gables and Miami Beach visuals from the Roaring ‘20s.
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Videos of Florida in the 1940s
Helin also found some 16mm reels at a garage sale about seven years ago that were in color from the 1940s and showed other parts of vintage Florida. As with Normandin’s moving images, he ran them through a film preservation process to turn old 8mm and 16mm films into a digital format and posted them on YouTube.
One of these finds is a ride from California to Jacksonville.
Another video takes viewers from Pensacola to West Palm Beach.
Diving into the Biltmore, Venetian pools
One thing we marveled at in Normandin’s footage of Coral Gables is that people back then apparently didn’t go for timid, hold-your-nose type of dives. Some of these people really knew how to execute flips and twisting dives off of quite tall towers you would never see these days outside of an Olympics facility. The men and women Normandin captured were not given to the cannonballs and belly flops we typically saw at public pools back in the day.
One of the loftiest perches, which towers into the sky, appears to be the old Roman Pools — formerly the Carl Fisher/St. John’s (bathing, not gambling) Casino — that was on the south side of 23rd Street on Miami Beach across the street from the Roney Plaza, Bramson observed.
And who knew people used canoes in the Biltmore’s pool? We know now, judging by the video.
‘Melancholy’ but moving history
“Just imagine how much material is still deteriorating in someone’s closest or attic,” Helin said. “Whenever I first view some of these older ones, a bit of melancholy comes over me, knowing that nearly all of the people we see in these films are physically dead now. But we still get to see them laughing, waving and overall enjoying their lives. They are someone’s grandparents, or perhaps great-grandparents.
“For a moment, we can see the world through their lives and appreciate the history they have entrusted to us to maintain for the next generation.”
