Miami's third building burst came after Castro. The 1959 Cuban Revolution sent hundreds of thousands of Cuban exiles north to South Florida, and the federal government opened the Cuban Refugee Center inside the Freedom Tower from 1962 to 1974 — the "Ellis Island of the South" — where Cubans arriving with nothing received medical care, paperwork, and resettlement support. Calle Ocho, the Southwest 8th Street corridor through Little Havana, became and remains the cultural main street of Cuban-American Miami: the cigar rollers, the café cubano windows, the painted Mediterranean Revival façade of the 1926 Tower Theater at 1508 SW 8th Street, the domino tables of Máximo Gómez Park at the corner of 15th Avenue. The Versace mansion — Casa Casuarina at 1116 Ocean Drive, built in 1930 by Alden Freeman as a Mediterranean Revival reimagining of the Alcázar de Colón in Santo Domingo — is one of the architectural anchors of the Ocean Drive Art Deco frame, even though the building itself predates the high Deco of the 1930s rebuild. On Collins Avenue, Morris Lapidus's Fontainebleau opened December 20, 1954, and gave Miami Beach a third architectural vocabulary, the MiMo (Miami Modern) resort-hotel style that ran through the 1950s and 1960s.
The Magic City was built in three short bursts. The first was the founding decade: Flagler's railway, the pool-hall vote of July 28, 1896, the Royal Palm Hotel of January 1897, and the riverfront and bayfront blocks that grew up around the station. The second was the 1920s land boom: George Merrick laid out Coral Gables in 1925 as a Mediterranean Revival planned city with the 1924 Venetian Pool, the 1926 Schultze and Weaver Biltmore Hotel, and the long Granada and Coral Way boulevards lined with banyans; James Deering's Vizcaya, finished in 1922 on Biscayne Bay, anchored Coconut Grove; the Freedom Tower, the Miami News Tower of July 1925, anchored downtown with the Giralda silhouette that Schultze and Weaver would use again for the Biltmore in Coral Gables and the Roney Plaza on Miami Beach; the Venetian Causeway opened in 1925 and ran the island-hopping route from Miami to Miami Beach; and on the Miami Beach barrier island itself, the first wave of what became the Art Deco Historic District began going up in 1923. Then the Great Miami Hurricane of September 18, 1926, came ashore as a Category 4 and ended the boom — but the rebuild through the 1930s, in the Tropical Deco style of Henry Hohauser and his contemporaries, gave South Beach the eight hundred Art Deco hotels, apartments, and storefronts that the Miami Design Preservation League fought to save in the 1970s and that the National Register recognized as the country's first 20th-century urban historic district on May 14, 1979.
Why People Visit Miami Florida
Miami offers the world's largest concentration of Art Deco architecture in the Miami Beach Historic District, the Italian Renaissance villa of Vizcaya on Biscayne Bay, the Schultze and Weaver Freedom Tower with its Giralda silhouette, George Merrick's 1925 Mediterranean Revival Coral Gables planned city, the long Cuban-American main street of Calle Ocho through Little Havana, the MiMo continuation up Collins Avenue from the Fontainebleau, and the bay and barrier-island geography that runs from Coconut Grove north through downtown to Bal Harbour. It is a coastal city that was incorporated by a Cleveland widow with an orange blossom and built three times in three short bursts since 1896. Magic City since 1896.
