Our Miami retro logo carries Florida's alligator and the date "1845" stamped beneath, for the year Florida became the 27th state of the Union. The black-and-white styling is retro, in the vocabulary of crate labels, mid-century beach signage, and the painted hotel placards that once ran the length of Ocean Drive. The alligator and the date do the work of placing the design in the founding generation of the state — and the city that was incorporated by a Cleveland widow with an orange blossom, built three times in three short bursts, and that has held the world's largest concentration of Art Deco architecture longer than any other city has held a 20th-century historic district.
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.
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.
