145 Commercial Street

Former Fishermen’s Cove Restaurant | Fisherman’s Cove Condominium (Unit B5).

Alfred R. Enos, a fisherman (and the future proprietor of Al’s Fish Market, 141 Commercial Street), bought the 145 Commercial Street property in 1941. The next year, his wife, Josephine F. “Josette” (Silva) Enos, the proprietor of Josette’s Beauty Salon, moved her business to this address. By the late 1940s, the Fishermen’s Cove restaurant (“-men,” plural) had opened “on the beach at 145 Commercial Street.” Enos made the following boast: “The only Restaurant in town with a real Fisherman Cook, serving real fresh Fish caught daily by his Fishing Boat. Served to you in his Fisherman-like Dining Room.” A 1948 street atlas labels the beachfront building “Rest.” The footprint of that building falls within — though it is smaller than — the footprint of Unit B5, suggesting that the old restaurant may have formed the structural core of the current building. At the very least, it stood on this site.

Fishermen’s Cove restaurant, which advertised in The Advocate on 14 July 1949, either occupied what is now Unit B5 or stood on the site of the current structure.

Peter Gee (1932-2005), a British Pop artist and New York City real-estate developer, bought the condominium property in 1983, just as he and the financier Paul Serra completed the renovation of the Puck Building in SoHo. Gee owned the cottage until 1993, when the mortgage was foreclosed. A year later, Gee and his wife, Olga Opsahl-Gee, opened the Hawthorne School of Art in Charles W. Hawthorne’s Class Studio on Miller Hill. The beachfront cottage has been owned since 1995 by a Miami Beach resident.

¶ Last updated on 9 April 2019.