Stiltsville: Miami’s Neighborhood in the Middle of the Ocean

A mile south of Cape Florida, where Biscayne Bay meets the open Atlantic, a handful of wooden houses stand on stilts ten feet above the water. There are no roads, no bridges, and no land beneath them. This is Stiltsville, one of the strangest and most beautiful neighborhoods in Florida.

Crawfish Eddie and the Bikini Club

The first shack went up in 1933 when a man named “Crawfish” Eddie Walker built a wooden structure on pilings over the shallow flats at the southern end of the bay. He sold bait and beer, and because the spot was a mile offshore, gambling was technically legal. More shacks followed. By the 1960s, Stiltsville had grown to 27 structures and become a playground for the well-connected. The most famous was the Bikini Club, where a self-styled Frenchman named Harry Churchville offered free drinks to any woman wearing a bikini. He ran the operation out of a grounded 150-foot yacht until the county shut him down.

Hurricanes and the Fight to Save Them

The ocean giveth and the ocean taketh away. Hurricane Betsy knocked out several houses in 1965. Hurricane Andrew leveled most of the rest in 1992, leaving just seven standing. The National Park Service, which absorbed Stiltsville into Biscayne National Park, originally planned to let the remaining houses decay and disappear. More than 75,000 people signed petitions to save them. In 2003, Congress stepped in and allowed the houses to remain under a public-private partnership with the Stiltsville Trust.

How to See Them

Six houses still stand today, each one a pastel-colored relic floating above the turquoise flats. You can only reach them by boat. Several tour companies run daily trips from Miami Beach Marina and Coconut Grove, and kayakers and paddleboarders sometimes make the trip from Key Biscayne on calm days. There is nothing else like it in Florida, or anywhere else.