Elbo Room co-owner Tracey Penrod died in the hospital Friday morning, a relative said on social media.
She died 10 days after a 12-foot fall at her Fort Lauderdale home that police are investigating as a domestic aggravated battery. Penrod was admitted to Broward Health Medical Center on March 14 in critical condition.
Last week, her brother Michael said she sustained severe brain damage and broken ribs.
A representative of the Penrods said in a statement emailed Friday that the family had no comment.
An incident report released Thursday by Fort Lauderdale Police said a domestic aggravated battery occurred at the Fort Lauderdale home about 6:30 a.m., which resulted in the victim’s injuries. The names, location, and other details are redacted in the report.
A man called 911 after the fall, yelling for officers to help. The caller told the dispatcher a woman “was climbing over the banister” and “fell on the concrete.” The details of what officers learned at the scene is also redacted in the report.
The family member who announced Penrod’s death on social media Friday asked that people “please be respectful of our family during this time as we go through another loss this year.” Penrod’s son Max Higney, 24, died last August.
Penrod, 54, was a co-owner, along with her siblings Michael and Michele, of the iconic Spring Break bar Elbo Room on Fort Lauderdale beach. The bar and the Penrod name have long been staples of South Florida — so woven into the city’s fabric that, in 2006, the family sought to have their bar declared a historic landmark.
“It’s a heritage thing,” Scott Grosky, a manager at SunDance Marine, said at the time. “The city was built on so many things, and one of them was this.”
The building where Elbo Room stands, at the corner of Las Olas Boulevard and State Road A1A, was originally built for a snack shop called Kaufman’s. The bar opened in 1938, and was rebuilt in 1956.
Jack Penrod, father of Michael, Tracey and Michele Penrod, took over in the 1980s, an era that cemented Fort Lauderdale’s reputation as a Spring Break destination.
As other legendary bars from that era — the Button, the Candy Store, Penrod’s and Summers on the Beach — closed their doors, and luxury hotels and condo buildings moved in, Elbo Room remained standing.
“It’s all we got left,” David “Rad” Corliss, a former Button employee, told the South Florida Sun Sentinel in 2006.
In 1996, the Elbo Room became the first commercial establishment to broadcast live on the internet, according to Mike Penrod, by putting a webcam on the beach.
To this day, viewers can tune in to live feeds of goings-on within the bar and on the beach outside.
Information from the Sun Sentinel archives was used in this report.
