Versace Mansion (Casa Casuarina)

Casa Casuarina is the mansion that was famous before the murder. Alden Freeman — Standard Oil heir, Mayflower descendant, retired architect at twenty-seven — built it in 1930 as a replica of the Alcázar de Colón, Diego Columbus's Santo Domingo palace, and put a brick from the original beside the front door. When Freeman died it became the Amsterdam Palace apartments, declining through the decades until Gianni Versace saw the Kneeling Aphrodite from Ocean Drive in 1992 and bought it for $2.95 million.

Versace rebuilt it into the villa that defined South Beach — the 24-karat-gold Thousand Mosaic Pool on the razed hotel lot next door, the eight bedrooms and the library and the gardens Sir Roy Strong designed. The house became the third most photographed home in America, after the White House and Graceland — and on July 15, 1997, Andrew Cunanan shot Versace dead on its front steps as he came home from the News Café, the crescendo of a cross-country murder spree that ended nine days later on a Miami Beach houseboat.

The mansion keeps the double fame — Versace's masterpiece and Versace's murder scene, the luxury hotel it is now preserving the designer's vision while the crowds photograph the steps where he died. The file holds the house's own arc: the oil heir's homage to Columbus, the fashion king's palace, and the steps where the twentieth century's most famous fashion murder made the house a shrine and a crime scene in the same image.

Casa Casuarina is the archive's Versace file — the 1930 Columbus-palace replica that the designer rebuilt into South Beach's icon and on whose steps he was murdered in 1997, now a hotel where the fame and the infamy share the address.