Overview
Glen and Lena Curtiss bought the land where Opa-Locka Airport is located in 1918 and in 1924 moved the headquarters of the Florida Ranch and Diary Corporation to where today's fire and crash station is located. After selling part of the ranch to the Seaboard Air Land Railroad and securing that a station would be built to serve the town, Mr. Curtiss founded the Opa-Locka Corporation in 1925 and had architect Bernhardt Muller design a town in an Arabian Nights' motif, inspired by the success of the recently released film, "The Thief of Bagdad" starring Douglas Fairbanks.
The first structure in Opa-Locka was a fifty-foot Moorish observation tower that housed the town's first well and real estate sales offices. This tower was located on the northeast corner of Cook's Hammock, a grove of oaks that Mr. Curtiss preserved as a park. Since nothing has been built, salesmen took clients to the observation platform and pointed out the location of their future homes sites. The foundations of this tower and the well-headed are still visible next to what remains of the original 60 acre hammock.
Where today the airport sits, Curtiss had urban planner Clinton McKenzie lay out Opa-Locka's country club section featureing an archery club with a swimming casino and a small private airfield for the Florida Aviation Camp surrounded by an eighteen-hole golf course and Cook's Hammock Park. The opening of the Florida Aviation Camp in 1927, two years before Pan American Field, the precursor to Miami International Airport, marks the beginning of aviation related activities at the site of Opa-Locka Airport. In 1929, the City of Miami bought a World War I blimp hangar located in Key West to house the Goodyear Blimp during its winter sojourn in Miami. The hangar was dismantled, its components carried north on the overseas railroad, and erected on the Florida Aviation Camp air field.
Before Mr. Curtiss' untimely death at age 52 in 1930, he lobbied to have one of the nation's first Naval Aviation Reserve Bases established in an 80 acre parcel north of the blimp hangar on land leased from the City of Miami. By 1939, this facility encompassed some 350 acres with a hangar, two paved runways and about a dozen mall buildings, most of which still exist.
In 1933, the Navy built a dirigible mooring mast in the western half of the airport, adjacent to the Aviation Reserve Base. This was one of the only five such instillations around the United States.
