Stephen Muss, a third-generation New York real estate developer who became a multimillionaire power broker after migrating to Florida — where, by reviving the flamboyant Fontainebleau Hotel, he helped transform Miami Beach from a refuge for older adults into a gaudy global resort — died on Aug. 23 at his home in Williamstown, Mass. He was 97.
The death was confirmed by his daughter Melanie Muss.
Mr. Muss, an imposing (6-foot-5, 250 pounds) former Brooklynite with a graying leonine mane, seemed perfectly cast to become what The Miami Herald once called “the most powerful man in Miami Beach.”
He could be impatient and ruffle feathers, but he was widely regarded as the catalyst who turned a declining community that was ripe for ridicule as “God’s Waiting Room,” because of its aging demographic, into a celebrity-studded destination — recast according to Oscar Wilde’s credo that nothing succeeds like excess.
After developing strip malls, homes and apartments on Long Island, in New Jersey and in Brooklyn and Queens, Mr. Muss and his father, Alexander, were on their way to becoming two of South Florida’s largest landlords when they constructed modernist landmarks like Seacoast Towers in Miami Beach, the Towers of Key Biscayne and the Towers of Quayside in Miami. In 1968, he built what became known as the Alexander Hotel, also in Miami Beach.
But it was the younger Mr. Muss’s rescue from bankruptcy, in 1978, of the Fontainebleau — the county’s largest hotel, a quarter-crescent extravaganza designed by Morris Lapidus and formerly owned by Ben Novack — that established him as a local power broker and reversed the decline of his adopted city.
“As goes the Fontainebleau,” Mr. Muss predicted, “so goes Miami Beach.”
The Fontainebleau, the namesake of a 1,500-room French royal chateau, opened in 1954. Billing itself as “the World’s Greatest Hotel,” it insinuated itself into pop culture, appearing in movies like “Goldfinger” (1964) and “Scarface” (1983). It became so famous that no signage was needed to identify it.
“A beautiful place,” the comedian Jack Benny once joked, “but they overdid things when they put a 10‐piece orchestra in the men’s room.”
Mr. Lapidus acknowledged that it was “the building Frank Lloyd Wright almost complimented me on.”
Its ballroom could accommodate 5,000 conventioneers. It boasted moorings for 50 private yachts. The frippery included an Art Deco statue of a maiden that had been created for the illustrious French ocean liner Normandie, and that Mr. Lapidus had bought for $1,200. (Mr. Muss later sold it to a cruise line for $170,000 in cash.)
Mr. Muss bought the hotel for $28 million — as a civic venture, he said. He invested well over $100 million in renovations, enlisted the Hilton chain to manage it and, in 2005, sold it for $165 million to the Soffer family’s Turnberry Associates.
He then moved from a hotel penthouse into a 12,000-square-foot house he bought for $14.5 million from the singer Lenny Kravitz.
As president of the Miami Beach Redevelopment Agency, Mr. Muss promoted an ambitious but ultimately unsuccessful plan that would have razed much of South Beach.
He did, however, succeed in persuading the city to impose a 3 percent bed tax on hotel room rates, which supported the expansion of the Miami Beach Convention Center and other public works. (His bulldozer diplomacy generated tens of thousands of signatures on petitions that persuaded officials not to rename the center in his honor.)
He also helped obtain South Pointe Park from the U.S. Army for use as a public recreation area.
Mr. Muss was an active philanthropist. In 1981, a high school in Israel, which has served thousands of students from abroad, was renamed for his father. Stephen Muss served as the school’s chairman. Since 2014, the school has been supported by the Jewish National Fund-USA.
He also supported the Jewish Federation of Miami; Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and Boston Children’s Hospital; the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach; and Haifa University in Israel.
Stephen Hobart Muss was born on Aug. 4, 1928, in Manhattan to Alexander and Gertrude (Silverstone) Muss and raised in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn. His father was the son of Isaac Muss, who had emigrated from Lithuania first to South Africa, where he built military barracks during the Boer War, and then to Brooklyn, where he started a development business in 1906.
After graduating from Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, Stephen joined his father and brothers in the family firm, Alexander Muss & Sons, which developed some 20,000 homes and 4,000 apartments in New York and New Jersey. The firm shifted its focus to Florida in the 1950s but continued to invest in projects in the New York area.
Although he was not known for his patience, Stephen Muss spent six years trying to win the city’s approval to build 1,600 apartments on the site of the Brighton Beach Baths in Brooklyn. A scaled-back version was finally approved in 1992, by which time the site had been sold to Muss Development, a separate company run by his cousin Joshua.
Mr. Muss is survived by his partner, Amy Jeschawitz; his children, Marilynn Rothstein, Jeffrey Muss and Sherry Muss, from his marriage to Carol Matelson, which ended in divorce; two daughters, Melanie and Heather Muss, from his marriage to Maureen Haver, who died in 1993; seven grandchildren; 12 great-grandchildren; and two sisters, Cynthia Lawrence and Lauren Muss. Another sister, Deborah Morgan, died.
A later marriage, to Sandra Paul, the former wife of a banker friend who had been sentenced to prison, also ended in divorce.
As the oldest son in a third generation of builders, Mr. Muss once said, “I could tell you how I started in the business picking up loose nails so they would not go to waste.”
“I’m not a hotelier,” he told The Herald. “I’m a construction man.” He owned the Fontainebleau, but, he said, “I don’t even know how to spell the name.”
Sam Roberts is an obituaries reporter for The Times, writing mini-biographies about the lives of remarkable people.
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