Cultural landmarks around the City of Miami find themselves in limbo. Theaters and community spaces are closed and face expensive repairs. In WLRN's four-part series, Culture of Neglect, we're shining light on what our community leaders are doing — or not doing — to restore these long-standing institutions. The series will run online and on air Monday through Thursday.
For 20 years, Miami Dade College operated the Tower Theater in Little Havana, a historic cinema that turns 100 in 2026.
During that time, the theater became the epicenter of the Miami International Film Festival, one of the college’s flagship cultural institutions. But beyond that, nearly every day patrons attended shows at the cinema, one of the few venues that offered Spanish-language films from across Latin America and Spain, in the heart of Miami’s Latino community.
Then, in one fell swoop, that legacy came to a close. In 2022, the City of Miami informed Miami Dade College that it would not renew the lease. City officials said it would directly manage the theater — and, unexpectedly — said it would no longer operate it as a cinema but as an event space.
“It makes no sense,” the then-director of the theater, Nicolas Calzada, told WLRN at the time.
“The stewardship of the college has just been impeccable,” Calzada said. “No one has anything bad to say about how Miami Dade College has managed and operated the building for 20 years.”
Two years after the city took over the property, Suzanne Batlle, the owner of Azucar Ice Cream Company, directly across the street from the theater, said she notices the difference, and not in a good way.
The nightly crowds that would grab a scoop of ice cream before or after a film are not as reliable. Film festivals that once brought large crowds for several days at a time have all had to relocate.
She sees it all through the windows of her ice cream shop. The venue is now closed most of the time, she said, attracting homeless residents who sleep in the crevices of the building. Dirt is visually accumulating on the sides of the building. The marquee that once announced films playing at the cinema is not functional, displaying a solid black with green and red dots.
The city told WLRN that when Miami Dade College left the site, it took the control panel that operates the marquee, and it has been inoperable ever since.
“Buses come through here to show people what the Cuban experience is — tourists. The Cuban experience is this building that’s falling apart right now?” she told WLRN. “It’s just sad. It’s very sad and depressing. And it’s my only view.”
“Growing up in Miami you feel like everything is always paved over. We don’t really have a sense of collective memory like how other cities do. And the Tower felt like one of those places that you could point to and say: That was here, those filmmakers were here."Robert Colom, local filmmaker
When the Tower Theater was first stripped from control of Miami Dade College, it was directly managed by the office of District 3 Commissioner Joe Carollo, the commissioner who spearheaded the effort to take it away from the college.
At first, Carollo tried to give control of the building to the Bay of Pigs Veterans Association. The problem was, the association wanted no part of the cinema.
Carollo’s office directly managed the theater until about six months ago, when the city’s Department of Real Estate and Asset Management (DREAM) took over management.
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DREAM director Andrew Frey told WLRN that, since his office took over, progress has been made to make better use of the theater space.
“We’re already booked for 100 events [for] the year,” Frey told WLRN.
Assuming one event per day, that would still leave more than two-thirds of the days without any events in space. However, a city spokesperson clarified to WLRN that there are two rooms where events can be held, “so there can be multiple events on the same day.”
The city said that it is not involved with promoters for events that are booked, so it is unable to provide estimates for attendance numbers for events.
An for the Tower Theater from when it was managed by Miami Dade College shows that multiple film screenings were scheduled nearly every day of a typical week, with additional programming when a film festival was underway.
Robert Colom volunteered at the Miami International Film Festival out of the Tower Theater when he was a student at Florida International University.
“Growing up in Miami you feel like everything is always paved over. We don’t really have a sense of collective memory like how other cities do. And the Tower felt like one of those places that you could point to and say: That was here, those filmmakers were here. I really loved it,” he said. “I always dreamed of being able to play my own films there too, because as an audience member it was so impactful to be there.”
Colom wrote and produced , a film about displacement in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last year.
When news came that the city wanted to take the Tower Theater away from Miami Dade College, he said he was “dumbfounded” by the move, and while he protested it, he knew it was a losing battle.
“I couldn’t believe that they were touching it. It felt like a new low,” he said.
Colom is also a film programmer at the Third Horizon Film Festival. In addition to the Tower Theater, the festival has also shown films at the Olympia Theater in downtown Miami and at the Little Haiti Cultural Center, both city-owned venues that have faced closures over maintenance issues.
For the latest Third Horizon Film Festival, shows had to be moved to the , a property owned by Miami Dade College in Little Havana. After the closure of the Tower Theater, the college renovated the space to use it as a part-time cinema; the Miami International Film Festival has also relocated to the space.
The overall impact of the loss of theater spaces has left the local filmmaker community and audiences in a state of homelessness, said Colom.
Partly in response to losing the Tower Theater and other venues closing down, Colom launched a project called CineMovil, a mobile cinema that stops in different neighborhoods. CineMovil tours a program of classic and contemporary films in Latino and Caribbean communities that have found a new home in South Florida.
“It’s the story of displacement and migration,” said Colom, “it’s just insane that it’s happening to us here in our new home.”
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