Bernard's Surf, Ramon's and the Glass Bank: Cocoa Beach on old postcards

The University of Central Florida’s RICHES archive holds a set of mid-century postcards of Cocoa Beach, each catalogued with what the archivists could learn about the place on it. Read together, they are a short history of where the space-age town ate, drank and slept.

Bernard’s Surf, 1948 to 2010

The longest-lived was Bernard’s Surf, at 2 South Atlantic Avenue. According to the archive, Bernard Fischer founded it in 1948, two years before the first rocket launch from the Cape; his nephew Rusty Fischer took it over in 1965, sold it in 2006, and it closed in 2010. Across the street, the same postcard shows Ocean Realty and a business called Teght’s, which by the late 1960s had become the Missile Lounge.

Ramon’s and the Mercury Seven

Donald and Allene Holt came to Cocoa Beach in 1956 and opened Ramon’s, at the corner of Atlantic Avenue and A1A. The archive says the restaurant honored the Mercury Seven, the first American astronauts: Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton. The Holts sold it in 1975, and a strip mall now stands where it was.

The Glass Bank

The town’s most striking building was the Glass Bank, the First Federal Savings and Loan building. Construction began in 1960 and finished in 1961, and the savings and loan opened the following year, according to the archive. Restaurants came and went at the top: the Sky Room opened in 1962 and closed in 1963; Ramon’s Rainbow Room opened in 1963, when work began on an outside express elevator, and ran until 1970; Marby’s Rainbow Room replaced it and closed in 1972. The bank changed hands through the 1980s and 1990s, the lower floors were empty by 2004, and the building was approved for demolition in 2014 and torn down in 2015.

The motels

Some of the motels served the Air Force directly. The Starlite Motel on A1A, founded by B. G. Nabbs, leased rooms to the U.S. Air Force in partnership with Sid Raffle, and its Starlight Lounge was a hangout for off-duty personnel from the Cape in the late 1950s, the archive says; it burned in May 1960. The Crossway Inn, at 3901 North Atlantic Avenue, had 100 rooms, a cocktail lounge, a restaurant, a pool and a private beach. The Ramada Inn at 900 North Atlantic Avenue had a Wolfie’s restaurant next door, a branch of a chain Wilfred Cohen had started as Al’s Sandwich Shop in Miami Beach. Of the Bal-Ray Resort at 400 North Atlantic, the archive records only that Peggy Lea owned it in the 1970s.

The pier those visitors walked out on has its own page.

Further Reading

• The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe