The 1920s land boom built the city’s defining architecture in the space of a few years. James Deering’s Italian Renaissance winter estate rose on Biscayne Bay in Coconut Grove by 1916, ahead of the wave. The Freedom Tower opened on Biscayne Boulevard on July 26, 1925, modeled on the Giralda bell tower of Seville’s cathedral. And George Merrick laid out Coral Gables, the Mediterranean Revival planned city of 1925, with its coral-rock Venetian Pool of 1924 at the center. Boom Miami was building a fantasy of the Mediterranean on a tropical bay — and calling itself the Magic City with a straight face, because the growth really did look conjured.
Across the bay, on the barrier island, the same boom raised eight hundred buildings between 1923 and 1943 in a style all its own: Tropical Deco — pastel facades, eyebrow ledges, porthole windows, neon script — Art Deco adapted to a subtropical shore, and in 1979 that square mile became the nation’s first 20th-century urban historic district. The boom itself did not survive the decade. The Great Miami Hurricane of September 18, 1926 struck the young city head-on and ended the speculation overnight; greater Miami rebuilt through the Depression years in the same pastel vocabulary, which is why the era still reads on the skyline today.
Why People Visit Miami Florida
Miami offers a founding story with an orange blossom at its center, a refugee tower that welcomed the community that remade the city, cafecito through walk-up windows, boom-era Mediterranean fantasies, and tropical light on Biscayne Bay. Visitors come for Little Havana, the Deco-era heritage, the bay, the Everglades at the back door, and the winter that made the city famous. Magic City since 1896.