Ace Ventura: Pet Detective | Campton Apartments, Miami Beach — The Flat Where the Zoo Lives

The gag only works because the building is so ordinary. Ace comes up the stairs, swears to his landlord that he keeps no animals, shuts the door — and the flat detonates into a penguin, a monkey, a toucan, a tortoise and a dozen other tenants nobody is paying rent for. The door is real. It belongs to the Campton Apartments at 1455 Washington Avenue, a low stucco apartment house on the block between 14th and 15th Streets in South Beach, and the production shot Ace's so-called Surfside flat right there rather than dressing a stage.

Stand on the sidewalk and the joke sharpens. This is not a movie-star address. It is a modest 1930s walk-up on a working stretch of Washington Avenue, the kind of place where a man with no money and too many animals would actually end up. The Cameo Theater sits next door at 1445, its deco frontage the landmark that tells you you have the right corner.

It is a private residence, so the pilgrimage is a pavement one — look up, find the windows, and go. What lingers is the scale of it: the whole running joke of a Miami zoo hidden behind one cheap front door, filmed on a street where nobody would look twice.

Photo: the Cameo Theater at 1445 Washington Avenue, the Campton's neighbour on the same block. Wikimedia Commons.