Once the home of Pan American’s flying boats, the terminal at Dinner Key has witnessed aviation history, presidential secrecy and almost a century of change.
By David Mason
Miami City Hall, Coconut Grove, Miami, Florida (2026)
Credit: Felix Mizioznikov
Yesterday, following lunch with a friend in downtown Miami, I received an unexpected invitation.
“I think you’d appreciate this,” he said.
My host, a local politician, was heading back to his office and offered to show me around. The office happened to be in Miami City Hall, a handsome white Art Deco building standing among the palms at Dinner Key, overlooking Biscayne Bay.
He had remembered an article I had written about the recent comeback of Pan American World Airways.
And there was a reason he thought I should see his office.
Miami City Hall wasn’t built as a city hall at all.
It was built for Pan American Airways.
For a brief and extraordinary period in the history of aviation, the building I was about to enter was one of America’s gateways to the world: a terminal from which passengers boarded flying boats bound across the Caribbean and onwards through Central and South America.
There was no runway.
The great Pan American flying boats simply took off from the waters of Biscayne Bay.
The rear elevation of Miami City Hall viewed from Biscayne Bay (2026)
Credit: Francisco Blanco
THE BIRTH OF THE CLIPPER
Dinner Key’s association with aviation predates Pan American.
Once a small island in Biscayne Bay, it was joined to the mainland during the First World War when the United States Navy established an aviation training base there. The old naval facilities were subsequently destroyed by the devastating Miami hurricane of 1926.
Aerial photograph reveals the devastation wreaked by the Great Miami Hurricane (1926)
Credit: Album
Four years later, another organisation arrived.
Pan American Airways was still remarkably young, but its ambitions were anything but modest. Under Juan Trippe, the airline was constructing an international network that would eventually stretch around the globe.
Miami was to become its gateway to the south.
In 1930 Pan Am acquired the New York, Rio & Buenos Aires Line, whose twin-engined Consolidated Commodore flying boats operated between Havana, Miami, and Buenos Aires.
A Consolidated Commodore NC659M, operated by NYRBA (December 27, 1929).
Credit: planecollection
Dinner Key was chosen as the base for Pan American’s inter-American operations, and on December 1, 1930, the first Pan Am flight departed from Dinner Key for Panama.
Initially, the facilities were decidedly less glamorous than the airline they would eventually serve.
Hundreds of people gather at Dinner Key to see the airline's new Sikorsky S-40s, the first aircraft Pan Am named "Clippers" - in homage to the great sailing ships of the mid nineteenth century (November, 1931).
Credit: State Archive of Florida
Before the permanent building was completed, Pan American’s first passenger “terminal” at Dinner Key was rather less grand.
A houseboat was acquired in Havana, towed across to Miami by tugs and anchored to pilings, with barges positioned at either end. From these decidedly makeshift beginnings, passengers embarked for Pan American’s growing network across the Caribbean and Latin America.
Before the permanent structure was built, passengers were handled aboard a floating terminal moored at the fledgling seaplane base (February 15, 1932)
Credit: Kenneth W. Thompson / Pan American Airways Magazine
It was never going to be adequate for Juan Trippe’s vision.
What followed was considerably more ambitious.
Land was reclaimed. Channels were dredged. Vast hangars were erected. And on the waterfront rose the white terminal building that survives today. By 1938, all the major structures envisaged for the complex were operational.
Pan American’s Dinner Key base at its height: the passenger terminal occupies the waterfront, with the airline’s vast hangars behind and Biscayne Bay serving as its runway (1940)
Credit: Curt Teich Postcard Archives / Heritage Image Partnership Ltd.
The location was dictated by the aircraft.
Much of the territory Pan American wanted to connect had little in the way of conventional airports. Water, however, was plentiful.
The flying boat neatly circumvented the problem.
And so the great Pan American Clippers came to Dinner Key.
THE GATEWAY TO THE AMERICAS
Pan American’s aircraft became steadily larger and more sophisticated as the airline pushed farther south.
Gateway to the Americas. A Pan American Airways route map traces the growing network that connected Miami with Cuba, Mexico, the Caribbean, Central and South America.
Credit: Pan American Airways Inc.
Charles Lindbergh, working as a technical adviser to Pan Am, helped survey some of its pioneering routes. Juan Trippe and Lindbergh understood that the flying boat could unlock an international network long before suitable land airports existed to accommodate it.
In the foreground is the legendary Sikorsky S-40 Pan Am "Clipper" with a Martin M-130 "China Clipper" flying above (1935).
Credit: Florida State Archive
From Miami, Pan American progressively connected the United States with the Caribbean, Central America and South America.
Dinner Key became the physical expression of that ambition.
Colourised postcard of two Pan American Sikorsky S-40R "Clipper" flying boats docked at the Dinner Key terminal (1935).
Credit: Chronicle
The scale of the operation is easily forgotten when looking at the elegant old postcards.
This was not merely a jetty with a ticket office.
Dinner Key became one of the most important marine aviation facilities in the world, with enormous hangars capable of accommodating the flying boats, maintenance facilities, passenger services and all the machinery necessary to run an international airline from the edge of Biscayne Bay.
Sikorsky S-41 flying boat in front of the Pan Am hangars at Dinner Key - with a couple of magnificent Chevrolet Special DeLuxe Convertibles in the foreground (1940).
Credit: Vintage Mechanics
For the passenger, however, the experience was rather more romantic.
One did not disappear down a jet bridge into an aluminium tube.
Beyond the terminal waited Biscayne Bay and, riding upon it, an aeroplane the size of a small ship.
The journey began at the water’s edge.
THE SHOW AT DINNER KEY
As Pan American’s network grew, Dinner Key became more than an airport.
It became an attraction.
In an age before airliners became part of the background noise of modern life, the arrival of a great flying boat was theatre.
Miamians drove down to Coconut Grove simply to watch.
Contemporary postcards advertised the spectacle (1936)
Credit: Curt Teich Postcard Archives / Heritage Image Partnership Ltd.
Cars filled the parking areas while spectators gathered at the water’s edge. Beyond them, Pan American aircraft taxied across Biscayne Bay.
The building itself encouraged spectatorship.
Crowds line the terraces of Pan American’s Dinner Key terminal to watch the flying boats come and go on Biscayne Bay (1935).
Credit: H. Armstrong Roberts / ClassicStock
A restaurant and cocktail lounge were situated upstairs. Outside, a promenade overlooked the bay, allowing visitors to watch the flying boats arrive and depart while having lunch or a drink.
Passengers could be ferried between terminal and aircraft aboard launches, making departure seem as much like boarding an ocean liner as catching an aeroplane.
Dinner Key in the golden age of the flying boat. A Pan American Fairchild 91 ‘Baby Clipper’ sits at the dock while Panair I crosses the waters of Biscayne Bay (1941).
Credit: Curt Teich Postcard Archives / Heritage Image Partnership Ltd.
Downstairs were the rather more serious mechanics of international travel: immigration, customs, ticket counters, waiting rooms, public-health facilities and an international mail office.
Air travel had not yet become transportation.
It was a show.
THE GOLDEN AGE
If the exterior of the terminal was restrained, its interior made Pan American’s ambitions unmistakable.
Passengers entered a soaring hall decorated with imagery celebrating aviation. Painted beams and murals traced the history of flight, from Leonardo da Vinci’s designs to Pan American’s own Clippers. Above were zodiac motifs; on the walls and exterior, globes, wings, suns and eagles proclaimed the airline’s international aspirations.
And dominating the room was the world itself.
Inside the Pan American terminal at Dinner Key - its enormous revolving globe weighed approximately three and a half tons and became an attraction in its own right (1940).
Credit: Pictorial Press
The globe weighed three and a half tons.
Thousands came to see it.
Look at photographs of the terminal in operation and it is difficult not to envy them.
Men wear suits. Women wear hats. Beneath a winged clock, passengers gather at tiled counters while a departure sign advertises Havana and Nassau.
And in the centre of everything sits the world.
The world at the centre of Dinner Key. Visitors crowd around Pan American’s enormous revolving globe, which became one of Miami’s attractions in its own right.
Credit: State Archives of Florida
There could scarcely have been a more effective advertisement for Pan American’s proposition.
The world was waiting.
Pan Am would take you there.
And once aboard, the romance continued.
The early Clippers bore little resemblance to the airliners that would eventually replace them. The Sikorsky S-40, introduced by Pan American in 1931, offered passengers a surprisingly civilised way to travel.
Its cabin was furnished more like a railway carriage or the saloon of a yacht than a modern aircraft, with upholstered seats arranged around tables and ample windows through which to watch the Caribbean pass below.
The Golden Age of air travel. Passengers play cards aboard a Pan American Sikorsky S-40 flying boat, complete with upholstered armchairs, tables and a wood-panelled cabin.
Credit: State Archives of Florida
Flying was still an event to be dressed for.
PASSENGER: MR. JONES
By January 1943, Dinner Key had become considerably more than a glamorous gateway to Havana and the Caribbean.
America was at war.
In the first days of that year, two Boeing 314 flying boats were prepared for a mission of extraordinary secrecy.
One was the Atlantic Clipper.
The other was the Dixie Clipper.
Boeing 314 Pan Am Atlantic Clipper at the Dinner Key terminal.
Credit: State Archives of Florida
Pan American’s pilots knew they were carrying an important passenger. What they did not initially know was his identity.
On the paperwork he was simply:
Mr. Jones.
Shortly before dawn on January 11, a presidential train that had travelled secretly from Washington arrived in Miami. At 5:45 that morning, Franklin Delano Roosevelt left the train near Dixie Highway and was driven to the Pan American base at Dinner Key.
“Mr. Jones” was the President of the United States.
At six o’clock that morning, the Dixie Clipper lifted from Biscayne Bay with Roosevelt aboard.
History had just been made.
Boeing 314 Dixie Clipper - only twelve of these aircraft were built, serving as luxury airliners before being repurposed for military transport during World War II.
Credit: W.Hoff
Franklin Roosevelt became the first sitting President of the United States to fly in an aeroplane.
His destination was Casablanca.
With German U-boats making an Atlantic crossing by ship perilous, Roosevelt was travelling by air to a secret meeting with Winston Churchill and the Allied leadership to determine the next phase of the war.
The journey was enormous.
From Miami, Roosevelt flew to Trinidad, then Belém in Brazil, before crossing the South Atlantic to British Gambia. From there a military C-54 carried him north to Casablanca.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill with Allied military leaders at Casablanca (January 14, 1943)
Credit: piemags / ww2archive
For ten days, Roosevelt and Churchill met with Allied political and military leaders. Among the subjects discussed was the next stage of the campaign against the Axis powers. The conference became famous for Roosevelt and Churchill’s declaration that they would accept nothing less than the unconditional surrender of Germany, Italy and Japan.
But the return journey produced an altogether more convivial scene.
On January 30, somewhere over the Caribbean, Franklin Roosevelt turned 61.
The President who had secretly left Miami as “Mr. Jones” was now heading home aboard the Dixie Clipper.
There was dinner.
There was champagne.
And at a table laid with white linen, china and glassware, the crew presented the President with a birthday cake.
President Roosevelt celebrates his 61st birthday aboard Pan American’s Dixie Clipper during the return journey. From left: Admiral William D. Leahy, President Roosevelt, Harry Hopkins and Pan Am captain Howard Cone (January 30, 1943).
Credit: National Archives
The photograph survives.
Roosevelt sits comfortably in a sweater, knife poised above the cake, surrounded by Admiral William Leahy, his adviser Harry Hopkins and Pan American captain Howard Cone.
Were it not for the small aircraft windows behind them, it could almost be the dining room of a private club.
Except they were flying home from a secret wartime conference aboard a flying boat.
Later that afternoon, the Dixie Clipper touched down on Biscayne Bay.
Roosevelt was back at Dinner Key.
A letter from Mr Jones (February 19, 1943)
Credit: Pan American Airways Inc.
The presidency had entered the age of aviation.
And it had done so from Miami.
THE LAST ORIGINAL CLIPPER
The very technology that had made Dinner Key necessary eventually made it obsolete.
The Second World War had demonstrated the extraordinary usefulness of the flying boat.
It also helped make it obsolete.
Across the world, wartime necessity produced longer runways and better airports, while a new generation of land-based aircraft emerged with the range to cross oceans without requiring a harbour beneath them.
The new generation of Clippers. Pan American flight crew beneath a Douglas DC-4, introduced in 1945. Converted from surplus military C-54 Skymasters, the land-based airliners helped consign the great flying boats to history.
Credit: Chronicle
The great advantage of the original Clipper - its ability to operate almost anywhere there was water - was disappearing.
The future belonged to the runway.
And Pan American already had one.
Before Dinner Key, there had been Pan American Field.
A Pan American Fokker Tri-Motor stands outside the airline’s pioneering passenger terminal at Pan American Field on NW 36th Street, Miami (1929).
Credit: ART Collection
In September 1928, two years before Pan Am established its seaplane operation at Dinner Key, the airline began operations from a new airport on Miami's NW 36th Street.
It was remarkably advanced for its time: two hard-surfaced runways, concrete aprons, hangars and a purpose-built passenger terminal with separate areas for arriving and departing passengers, a restaurant, customs, immigration and public-health facilities.
Its architects were Delano & Aldrich - the same New York firm that would subsequently design the terminal at Dinner Key and, later, the Marine Air Terminal at New York’s LaGuardia Airport, which opened in 1939.
The inauguration of Pan American Field on NW 36th Street (January 9, 1929).
Credit: Pan American Airways Inc.
In 1932, as Pan American increasingly concentrated its Caribbean operations around seaplanes, flights moved from the land-based airport to Dinner Key.
Little more than a decade later, aviation had turned full circle.
The landplane had won.
The changing of the guard. Pan American's first Douglas DC-4 flies above a Boeing 314 Clipper as its crew wave from the flying boat below (1945).
Credit: Pan American Airways Inc.
On August 9, 1945, Pan American's final flight to Dinner Key arrived.
The date is remarkable.
On that same day, on the other side of the world, an atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki.
Six days later, Japan announced its intention to surrender.
The Second World War was effectively over.
And almost simultaneously, so was the age that had created Dinner Key.
The Clippers disappeared from Biscayne Bay.
Pan American, however, did not disappear from Miami.
Its future lay with the new generation of land-based aircraft and the expanding airport system west of the city - the beginnings of the international aviation hub that Miami would become.
The future arrives. Pan American took delivery of its first Lockheed Constellation in January 1946. With its pressurised cabin allowing passengers to fly above the clouds, the elegant ‘Connie’ helped usher in a new age of international air travel.
Credit: Chronicle
THE WORLD MOVES ON
The Clippers were not the only things to leave Dinner Key.
The enormous globe that had once dominated the terminal eventually departed too.
Created for Pan American by Rand McNally, the painted steel sphere weighed some 6,500 pounds and measured more than 31 feet around.
The world at Dinner Key. Visitors gather around Pan American’s enormous revolving globe, once the centrepiece of the terminal and a symbol of the airline’s global ambitions (1943).
Credit: State Archives of Florida
For passengers standing around it in the 1930s and 40s, it represented the world Pan American intended to conquer.
And, remarkably, it survived.
After leaving Dinner Key, the globe found another home at the Miami Science Museum in Coconut Grove, where it remained for 55 years. Generations of Miami children who had never seen a Pan American Clipper grew up alongside the same enormous world that had once greeted passengers departing for Havana and Nassau.
A new home for the world. Pan American’s great Dinner Key globe is installed at the Miami Museum of Science in 1960, where it would remain for more than half a century.
Credit: Frost Science
When the museum closed in 2015, the globe once again found itself without a home.
But its travels weren't over.
Acquired by Miami Worldcenter in 2020, it underwent an extensive restoration before being installed in Downtown Miami, just a few miles from the terminal for which it had originally been created.
The world moves on. Pan American's great Dinner Key globe, restored and displayed at Miami Worldcenter more than ninety years after it first greeted passengers at the seaplane terminal.
Credit: Miami Worldcenter
Pan American itself disappeared in 1991.
The Clippers had disappeared decades before.
But more than ninety years after it first stood at the centre of the Dinner Key terminal, Pan American's world is still turning.
CITY HALL
The terminal proved equally difficult to dispose of.
Front elevation of the Dinner Key Terminal (1936).
Credit: Burton Holmes / Archive Farms Inc.
In December 1945, with the flying boats gone, the City of Miami put down $25,000 towards the purchase of the former Pan American base. The deal was completed the following September for $1.11 million.
The original ambition was not to create a city hall.
Miami envisaged Dinner Key as a municipal yacht basin and recreation centre, with restaurants and concessions helping to pay for it. With money for redevelopment scarce, parts of the sprawling Pan American complex were leased out while the city decided what to do with its remarkable acquisition.
The old terminal soon returned to something approaching its former glamour.
In June 1948, the Marina Restaurant and Lounge opened inside the former Pan American building, offering dining and dancing beside Biscayne Bay.
From Clippers to cocktails. The former Pan American terminal reopened as the Marina Restaurant and Lounge (1948).
Its first season proved eventful.
Later that year, police raided the premises and confiscated illegal slot machines.
Dinner Key had gone from international aviation to dinner, dancing and illicit gambling in barely three years.
The restaurant subsequently reopened under new management, and in 1951 another incarnation followed: Jackie Heller’s Dinner Key Terrace, a restaurant and nightclub offering entertainment and panoramic views across the same waters from which the Clippers had once departed.
Another life for Dinner Key. Jackie Heller’s Dinner Key Terrace transformed the former Pan American terminal into a waterfront restaurant and nightclub in the early 1950s.
Meanwhile, municipal government was gradually creeping in.
The City’s Traffic Department moved to Dinner Key in 1948, and by the early 1950s Miami needed a new home for its expanding municipal administration.
In July 1953, the City Commission made its decision.
Dinner Key would become City Hall.
Following renovations, municipal departments moved into the former Pan American terminal in February 1954.
Miami City Hall (1954)
The building that had once dispatched passengers to Havana, Nassau and Buenos Aires was now running Miami.
In 1975, the former terminal was added to the National Register of Historic Places. A major restoration followed in 2003, reviving its original Art Deco details, zodiac ceiling panels and aviation murals.
Miami City Hall following its restoration in 2003.
Credit: Mark Hamilton
The building carries unmistakable clues to its original purpose.
Around its exterior upper walls runs an Art Deco frieze of winged globes and rising suns, with sculpted eagles at the corners - imagery that makes considerably more sense once one knows that the building was conceived for an airline rather than a municipal government.
A section of the art deco frieze on the exterior of Miami City Hall.
Credit: Hambones
Inside, original decorative features have since been restored, including painted beams, murals and ceiling panels depicting the signs of the zodiac. High above the former departure hall, the story of flight still progresses from Leonardo da Vinci to the Pan American Clippers.
Miami City Hall interior.
Credit: City of Miami Office of Communications
The great globe may have gone.
But much of the world that once surrounded it remains.
And outside, perhaps the most evocative original feature survives entirely untouched.
Biscayne Bay.
Dinner Key today. Miami City Hall sits at the water’s edge, surrounded by the marina, with the great expanse of Biscayne Bay beyond - the runway from which Pan American’s Clippers once took to the sky.
Credit: Francisco Blanco
Stand on the waterfront today and suddenly the geography explains everything.
The marina is filled with yachts rather than Clippers, but the terminal still faces the water.
Look beyond the palms and across Biscayne Bay and it requires surprisingly little imagination to reconstruct the scene: engines starting, propellers turning, a flying boat easing away from its mooring before accelerating across the bay and climbing into the Florida sky.
It must have been magnificent.
ANOTHER DEPARTURE
My visit this week turns out to have been particularly well timed.
Miami is preparing to move again.
A new City of Miami Administration Building is being constructed at Miami Freedom Park, near Miami International Airport, with the City currently expecting to begin moving into its new home in late 2027.
The next destination. The design for the new City of Miami Administration Building at Miami Freedom Park, scheduled to become the home of Miami’s municipal government in 2027.
Credit: Arquitectonica
While searching for a rendering of the new building for this article, I discovered one final twist in the story.
The architects are Arquitectonica.
I knew the name immediately.
Arquitectonica designed Ocean Place at 225 Collins Avenue - our home in Miami.
Of all the architects, in all the buildings, in all of Miami.
Perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised.
This story had begun, after all, with a lunch I hadn't expected to write about; an invitation I hadn't expected to receive; and a visit to an office I hadn't known occupied one of the most important surviving buildings in the history of Pan American Airways.
Now, at the other end of the story, I had somehow arrived back at my own front door.
Ocean Place, 225 Collins Ave., Miami Beach (2026)
Credit: David Mason
There is a pleasing geographical symmetry to it all.
Almost a century ago, Pan American moved its Miami operations from Pan American Field, the land-based airport on NW 36th Street, to the waters of Dinner Key.
Now Miami's government is preparing to make the journey in the opposite direction. The new City Administration Building at Miami Freedom Park will stand barely five minutes from the site of the old Pan American Field - the place where this story began in 1928.
And that leaves the old terminal facing another chapter.
First it was an airport.
Then it was a city hall.
What comes next remains to be seen.
Walking out after my visit, I found myself looking at the building rather differently from when I had entered it.
Miami is a city that has a habit of reinventing itself. Buildings disappear, skylines change and entire neighbourhoods seem capable of being transformed almost overnight.
Yet on the edge of Biscayne Bay stands a survivor from another Miami.
The flying boats have gone.
The enormous globe has gone.
Pan American itself has gone.
And before long, City Hall will go too.
But the terminal remains.
Another departure. Miami City Hall at Dinner Key, as the former Pan American terminal prepares to enter the next chapter of its remarkable life.
Credit: Francisco Blanco
More than ninety years after passengers passed through its doors carrying tickets for Havana, Nassau and destinations far beyond - and more than eighty years after a passenger named “Mr. Jones” slipped quietly aboard a Clipper bound for a meeting that would help shape the course of the Second World War - the old Pan American gateway still stands beside the water.
Waiting for its next departure.
Click here to read more about Pan American World Airways.