Miami holds the world's largest concentration of Art Deco architecture. The Tequesta people lived at the mouth of the Miami River on Biscayne Bay for thousands of years before European contact. The Spanish came in 1513, the British in 1763, and the territory passed to the United States in 1821, with Florida becoming the 27th state on March 3, 1845. The modern city began with a Cleveland widow named Julia DeForest Tuttle, who in 1891 sold her late husband's iron foundry and bought 640 acres on the north bank of the Miami River, at the old Fort Dallas military site, and began a relentless campaign to convince the Standard Oil baron and Florida East Coast Railway builder Henry M. Flagler to extend his railroad south to the wilderness she could see from her porch. When the Great Freeze of 1894-1895 wiped out the citrus belt of central and northern Florida, Tuttle sent Flagler an orange blossom dispatched by courier as proof her south Florida coast had been spared. The order to extend the tracks came. On April 22, 1896, the first Florida East Coast Railway train rolled into the Miami River, and on July 28, 1896, 502 male residents met in a downtown pool hall and voted to incorporate the City of Miami; Julia Tuttle is the only woman ever to have founded a major American city, and Flagler's Royal Palm Hotel opened its doors at the river's mouth in January 1897. The 1920s land boom built three of the city's defining works of architecture, all in the space of about three years: James Deering's Vizcaya estate on Biscayne Bay in Coconut Grove (built 1914-1922 in the Italian Renaissance and Mediterranean Revival style by architect F. Burrall Hoffman with artistic director Paul Chalfin and the Colombian landscape architect Diego Suarez, designated a National Historic Landmark in 1994); the Freedom Tower on Biscayne Boulevard (opened July 26, 1925, designed by Schultze and Weaver as the Miami News Tower and modeled on the Giralda bell tower of the Cathedral of Seville, later the Cuban Refugee Center from 1962 to 1974 — the "Ellis Island of the South" — and designated a National Historic Landmark on October 6, 2008); and George Merrick's Coral Gables, the Mediterranean Revival planned city of 1925, with its 1924 Venetian Pool and its 1926 Schultze and Weaver Biltmore Hotel. Across the bay on the Miami Beach barrier island, between 1923 and 1943, eight hundred buildings went up in the Tropical Deco style that adapted Art Deco to a subtropical climate — pastel facades, eyebrow ledges, porthole windows, neon signage, nautical motifs — and the entire one-square-mile district was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on May 14, 1979, as the nation's first 20th-century urban historic district. Henry Hohauser's Colony Hotel of 1935 sits on Ocean Drive at the center of it. The Great Miami Hurricane of September 18, 1926, ended the land boom, and the city rebuilt through the 1930s under the same Tropical Deco vocabulary that defines South Beach today. On Biscayne Bay since the Tequesta.
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.
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.
