Rockstar Games dropped the second trailer for Grand Theft Auto 6 today, shedding more light about the game’s characters and story. As fans tried to determine which actors could be voicing which characters, I was hung up on an entirely different but otherwise completely inconsequential detail: Is that the Clevelander?!
GTA 6 takes place in Vice City, the Grand Theft Auto facsimile of Miami and the eponymous setting of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Upon its release in 2006, Vice City portrayed an admirable recreation of Miami. But graphical technology in video games has obviously improved immensely in the intervening 20 years. All trailers and screenshots released to date indicate that GTA 6’s take on Miami will be stunningly close to the real thing — so close, in fact, that it appears to feature some IRL institutions.
A representative for Rockstar Games didn’t respond to a request for comment in time for publication, so I can’t claim with 100% certainty that this is meant to be the Clevelander, but also: This is clearly the Clevelander. I’m sure of it. Probably.
The Clevelander, a hotel located on Ocean Drive in the center of Miami Beach’s Art Deco district, was originally built in the 1930s, but it didn’t come into its own until a sale and subsequent renovation in the late 1980s. According to the Miami Design Preservation League, brothers Tony and Kent Kay took over the space, added a bar, and booked musical acts for outdoor concerts every night. Local noise ordinance laws passed in the ’90s prevented many hotels from playing loud music late into the evening, but the Clevelander happened to be located in a two-block radius exempted from those laws, essentially allowing for the party to continue until it ran out of steam.
Well, 30 years later, the party is still going. At pretty much all hours, you’ll see people slinging back tequila shots and dancing — not just on the elevated dance floor, but in the pool, on tables, and maybe even on the bar. The Clevelander is the type of place where a bare-chested man will show up at 1:30 a.m. on a Thursday wearing a floor-length leopard fur coat and not even remotely look out of place (true story). It is, in other words, Grand Theft Auto fodder in a bottle.
Here’s another fun detail that illustrates how much of a party vibe the Clevelander gives off: The hotel’s marketing department (which, say, a journalist reaching out for comment would typically hit up) shares a phone extension with its bottle service reservations.
The Clevelander did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.
For approximately 0.06 seconds in the second GTA 6 trailer, you’ll catch a shot of a neon-pink courtyard, flanked by Art Deco walls that look suspiciously like those of the Clevelander (one curved, one straight). People dance on literally all surfaces. You can’t see anyone rocking a full-length fur coat in 85ºF weather, but you just know, somewhere off screen, he’s there, watching, waiting, probably crushing a margarita, definitely sucking down an entire cigarette in a single drag.
I visited the place earlier this year, and came away with the takeaway that the Clevelander is Miami Beach. (Not a compliment so much as an observation.) I asked the person with whom I visited if the screenshot above bore a resemblance to the place we saw a bunch of off-duty banking interns dancing next to plastic flamingos.
Their response? “Abbbbbbbbsolutely.”
