What’s with the Art Deco? Walk down Ocean Drive and the whole street looks like a 1930s daydream painted in sherbet — pastel hotels with rounded corners and racing stripes, porthole windows, and neon that comes alive at dusk. This is the Miami Beach Architectural District, the largest concentration of Art Deco buildings anywhere in the world: roughly eight hundred of them, packed into the blocks of South Beach. Most went up in the 1930s — small stucco hotels built cheap and optimistic during the Depression — in a local style so distinct it earned its own name: Tropical Deco, with nautical curves, shady “eyebrows” over the windows, and a palette borrowed from the sea and the sunset.
It started with a bridge. Collins ran short of money finishing a two-and-a-half-mile wooden span to the mainland — the longest in the world at the time — and Fisher loaned him the cash in exchange for land. On March 26, 1915, Collins, Fisher, and the Lummus brothers folded their separate beach companies together and chartered the Town of Miami Beach. Fisher then sold it to the world: grand hotels, polo fields, and a Times Square billboard that promised “It’s always June in Miami.” For one publicity stunt he posed a baby elephant as a golf caddie for a president-elect. America’s winter playground was open for business.
Why People Visit Miami Beach
Miami Beach rewards visitors who want style with their sand: the world’s great Art Deco strip, a wide Atlantic beach, walkable streets, and neon nights. Add the South Beach glow and the year-round Florida sun, and the man-made island makes an easy case for itself.
