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.
The 1920s land boom made Miami Beach famous, and the great 1926 hurricane nearly unmade it, ending the Florida boom in a single storm. But the rebuilding is what gave us the Beach we know. Through the 1930s, developers threw up hundreds of small, affordable Streamline-Moderne hotels along Ocean Drive and Collins Avenue, each one curved and finned and crowned with neon. Lincoln Road became the “Fifth Avenue of the South.” And when the war came, roughly half a million troops trained on these beaches — many of whom, unable to shake the sand from their shoes, came back to stay.
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.
