“I remember one of the waitresses was chasing the cook around once with a steak knife. People were wild back then, into drugs and whatnot,”

By Jason Jeffers

It’s just after midnight and things are slow at the Denny’s on the corner of 69th Street and Collins Avenue. A steady flow of traffic zooms up Collins, away from South Beach, but there aren’t too many people at the restaurant. The few inside are all regulars however, as much a part of the scenery as the scuffed and tattered booths around the room.

“I remember I first came here as opposed to the IHOP next door because Denny’s had a better menu at the time, plus the fan over in the IHOP was too small and the place used to be filled with a greasy smell,” says Stephen Weiss, fashioning an origami bird out of his paper Denny’s placemat. A master of the art form, Weiss has had three instructional books published on the subject, and has been coming to this Denny’s since it opened more than two decades ago. “IHOP has the better food now — a lot of their stuff isn’t fried: grilled pork chops, battered cod — but the ambiance here is still better.”

Weiss will have to get used to IHOP’s vibe. As of Thursday, August 17 at 6 a.m., the Denny’s at 6900 Collins Ave. closed its doors for good. According to a Denny’s spokesperson, the property has been sold and will now serve as a sales center for Canyon Ranch Miami Beach, a new complex of oceanfront condominiums that promotes wellness and healthy living, which is going up across the street.

Denny’s restaurants are a dime a dozen in this town (and in almost every other town around the United States, for that matter) but to hear the staff and the patrons of the North Beach Denny’s tell it, this location has become something of a neighborhood institution since it opened in 1984; it’s a place for locals to get to know each other just a little bit better.

“This place has always had a lot of life to it. I’ve been coming here so long I pretty much have a parking space,” says John Barnhill, a crane operator who’s working on the Canyon Ranch construction site across the street. It’s just after 5 a.m., and this morning, like almost every other morning, he and some of his workmates come in for breakfast. “In the summer, you have the kids hanging out during the daytime. The whole year round you have people coming here after going to South Beach to sober up a bit, as well as all the regulars of course, and it’s a lot of them; people just coming and going, man.”

“The hood will never be the same,” wrote Daisy Myers, a regular at the restaurant and one of several people who e-mailed the SunPost with their farewell messages and recollections of the restaurant. “You weren’t a number at Denny’s, but a family member.”

A big part of that family formed around Lisa Horowitz. A waitress at this particular Denny’s for 17 years up until last Thanksgiving, Horowitz worked the night shift and was a part of the lives of everyone who came to the 24-hour restaurant in the wee hours of the morning, whether they were (like Myers) members of the Monday night gang — a group of residents who would meet weekly after midnight to discuss local politics and world affairs — or even the homeless people who frequented the area back in the neighborhood’s rougher days.

“We had plenty of fights and there used to be a lot of drug dealers and people coming around selling jewelry,” remembers Horowitz. “I remember that one of our regulars killed someone for a pair of shoes; he used to come in all the time and order a plate of French fries and a glass of water!”

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