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.
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.
