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koko motel -cocoa beach florida -any info??

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i know i have seen this somewhere before...thought it was on tiki central but a search turned up nothing.....found this postcard today.

Looks like it was Pagoda-themed throughout, and "Ko-Ko" was a character in the musical, "The Mikado". So my first guess would be a Japanese or Oriental themed Motel. Still pretty Exotic. Florida had an embarassment of Exotic-themed hotels and restaurants in the 60s. Nice find.

Sabu

Cool find, that area must have been hopping back in the day. I love the two beds with one oriental style headboard connecting them and am I imagining things or are those Witco's on the far wall of the dining room? The green one looks similar to a Chinese junk piece they did.

Bosko

..i looked closely at the card and they don't really look like witco..the characters are little chinese people and they look like they are made of fabric and 3-dimensional...

T

Vintage match cover from the KoKo Motel in Cocoa Beach, Florida… already open for business by 1959 in the early years of the Space Race, this motel served as the NASA press headquarters for Scott Carpenter’s Mercury-Atlas 7 launch on May 24, 1962, the second ever U.S. manned orbital mission… in 1966, Frank Sinatra Jr. was performing at the KoKo Motel when he learned of his dad’s marriage to Mia Farrow… a Motel 6 now occupies the site…

-Tom

T

More about the KoKo Motel from inside the match cover…

-Tom

T

Amazingly, NASA had the foresight to commission artists in the early days of the Space Race to record the strange new world being created… one of the products of that project was a beautiful circa 1962 watercolor and ink painting by Chrystal Jackson that features the KoKo Motel in Cocoa Beach, Florida, the same motel of my previous vintage match cover post… love the dragon façade revealed in this painting… there is a second felt tip pen on paper work by Mario Cooper in 1969 that features palm trees at what appears to be the KoKo Motel’s poolside…

You can see more of this project’s creations at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum web site, including an expanded view of those two pieces of art at:

http://airandspace.si.edu/collections/artifact.cfm?object=nasm_A19781173000

http://airandspace.si.edu/collections/artifact.cfm?object=nasm_A19751260000

-Tom

Pages: 1 6 replies