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.
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.
