Today Miami is, above everything, a coastal city of architecture: the 1916 Vizcaya on Biscayne Bay, the 1925 Freedom Tower with its Giralda silhouette downtown, the 1925 Coral Gables Mediterranean Revival blocks of George Merrick, the eight hundred buildings of the 1923-1943 Miami Beach Art Deco Historic District running south to north up Ocean Drive and Collins Avenue, the 1954 Fontainebleau and the 1963 Bacardí Building and the 1963 Miami Marine Stadium on Virginia Key as the MiMo continuation, and the long Cuban-American main street of Calle Ocho running west from Brickell through Little Havana. Our Miami designs are made for that architecture — the Magic City built three times in three short bursts since Julia Tuttle's orange-blossom envelope, and that has carried the world's largest Art Deco concentration through every decade since 1923.
The Tequesta fished and hunted at the mouth of the Miami River for thousands of years before European contact. The Spanish came in 1513 with Juan Ponce de León, lost Florida to the British in 1763, took it back in 1783, and surrendered it to the United States in 1821; Florida became the 27th state on March 3, 1845. The American territorial era brought the Seminole Wars — Fort Dallas, on the north bank of the Miami River, was one of the military installations of that long campaign, and it was on the Fort Dallas land that Julia Tuttle would later build her city. William and Mary Brickell were already there when she arrived, trading on the south bank of the river; Mary Brickell became, after Tuttle, the Other Mother of Miami, and the Brickell name stayed on the downtown financial district south of the river.
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.
