Miami Beach Art Deco District

Visited on: Wednesday 25 December 2019

I spent Christmas 2019 with my family in Florida celebrating my dad’s 70 birthday (which is actually in March). Our hotel was about 30 miles south-west of Miami in Florida City. Christmas Day was our first full day in Florida and we had booked dinner at a restaurant in Miami Beach. We woke up to a grey, overcast morning, although the clouds gave way to hazy sunshine as we set off towards Miami.

My sister’s husband was driving, and didn’t realise that the Sat-Nav in the hire car was programmed to avoid toll roads, even though we had a weekly pass for the toll freeways. Instead of taking the fast Florida’s Turnpike, which would have whisked us to Miami in three quarters of an hour, we proceeded slowly along the ruler-straight South Dixie Highway, with its endless traffic lights, retail parks and drive-thru fast food outlets. By the time we reached Miami Beach, it was already midday, the roads were gridlocked and there was nowhere to park. Unlike Britain and Europe, where everything is closed on Christmas Day, the restaurants, cafés and shops along Ocean Drive were doing a roaring trade and the streets were packed with pedestrians and motorists. We only had a couple of hours until the meal, and I was impatient to get out of the car to explore. Luckily, we were moving so slowly along Ocean Drive that I was able to wind the window down to get some photos of the colourful art deco hotels while we sat queuing at every set of traffic lights.

Eventually, we found an on-street parking space near our restaurant, which was not far from the western end of Lincoln Road, the pedestrianised shopping street which runs east-west across the barrier island on which Miami Beach sits. By now the weather was hot and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. We had parked quite some distance from the main art deco area along Ocean Drive and Collins Avenue, and I was keen to get there as quickly as possible, but my sister’s family was in no great hurry, more interested in exploring the delights of CVS Pharmacy and the other shops along Lincoln Road. I had no reason to complain, as Lincoln Road was one of the most attractive pedestrianised streets anywhere, with street cafés set among lush palm trees, covered walkways, fountains and sculptures.

Lincoln Road features some interesting examples of “MiMo” (Miami Modernist) architecture, the work of the Miami-based architect Morris Lapidus in the early 1960s. At its eastern end are some older art deco buildings from the 1930s, such as the former Lincoln Theatre designed by Thomas W. Lamb, which was later converted into a concert hall and subsequently an H&M store.

Eventually, we reached the eastern end of Lincoln Road, where it crosses the busy Collins Avenue next to a line of tall seafront hotels. The most striking of these is the Delano, designed by Robert Swartburg, with its distinctive four-finned tower rising up from its zigzag façade. Named after President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the hotel was Miami’s tallest building when it was completed in 1947.

As we approached the coast, a thick bank of cloud loomed over the rooftops, but it was still a long way out at sea and the sunny weather held out for an hour or so until we went indoors to eat our Christmas meal.

A path through a strip of dense palm trees brought us to the beach, with its miles of fine, white sand backed by towering skyscrapers. Miami Beach sits on a narrow, 10 mile-long barrier island, separated from Downtown Miami by Biscayne Bay and linked to it by several causeways. There are over 700 miles of barrier islands in Florida, and they form much of the east coast of the United States. While many barrier islands are natural formations, the ones near Miami are partially man-made, and the beach has to be constantly replenished with sand dredged from the ocean floor to combat erosion caused by storms and hurricanes. Most of the City of Miami Beach sits at an altitude of just 1.3 metres above mean sea level, putting it at constant risk of flooding, even during periods of dry weather, as high tides and rising sea levels can cause water to rise up through the porous limestone bedrock. The underlying geology is unsuitable for the kinds of coastal defences found in other low-lying regions such as the Netherlands, leaving the long-term future of Miami Beach and many other coastal communities in Florida very much in doubt.

We stopped for a while for the kids to paddle in the ocean, and then walked along the path behind the beach to Lummus Park, a long strip of greenery shaded by tall palm trees on the eastern side of Ocean Drive between 5th and 15th Streets. It was my first visit to subtropical climes, and it felt very exotic standing under the magnificent coconut palms looking towards the Atlantic Ocean.

At this point, my family decided that it was time to head for the restaurant, even though it was still well over an hour until our 2.30 pm booking. Leaving them at the northern end of Lummus Park, I set off on my own to spend half an hour looking at the historic art deco buildings which are mainly concentrated along Ocean Drive and Collins Avenue between 5th and 23rd Streets. Officially known as the Miami Beach Architectural District, the neighbourhood was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979 and is home to around 900 historic buildings in several styles, including over 200 examples of Mediterranean Revival architecture from the 1920s. By far the most important style represented is art deco, with nearly 500 examples dating from the mid-1930s to the late 1940s.

Miami Beach’s potential as a holiday resort was first recognised at the beginning of the 20th century, shortly after the arrival of the railroad and the establishment of the City of Miami in 1896. In 1913, the New Jersey entrepreneur John S. Collins set about constructing a 2½ mile-long wooden bridge to connect the mainland with what was then a long narrow peninsula covered in mangroves, on which he and his co-investors planned to develop a resort town. The town of Miami Beach was established in 1915 and the first hotel, Brown’s, opened the same year. A property boom followed, with the construction of grand hotels and second homes for the wealthy, but the area was devastated by a massive hurricane and storm surge in September 1926. After years of depression, the town’s fortunes began to revive in the mid-1930s, and large numbers of new hotels were built in the art deco style, many of them on a more modest scale designed to cater for middle-class holidaymakers.

By the 1970s, many of these buildings were in a poor state of repair and at risk of demolition, but thanks to the efforts of the Miami Design Preservation League founded by Barbara Baer Capitman in 1976, their architectural value has now been officially recognised and they are one of Miami’s most popular attractions.

The most colourful and flamboyant examples of art deco can be found along the stretch of Ocean Drive facing Lummus Park. A typical example of the characteristic “tropical art deco”, with its bright orange and peach ornamentation and lighthouse-like circular corner tower, is the Waldorf Towers Hotel (Albert Anis, 1937) on the corner of 9th Street.

One block to the north is one of the city’s most admired art deco buildings, the Breakwater Hotel (Anton Skislewicz,1936). The symmetrical, angular design features a central tower adorned with huge, blue neon signs, and a roof terrace with railings resembling the deck of an ocean liner.

Further on is another of Miami Beach’s most glamorous hotels, the Clevelander (Albert Anis, 1938). Like many of the neighbouring properties, it was originally a single block with a narrow façade stretching lengthways inland, but in 1951 the owners commissioned Robert Swartburg, the designer of the Delano, to extend the property. A long, curving, concrete canopy topped with the name “Clevelander” in huge neon letters was built, linking the hotel entrance with a circular covered patio bar. An outdoor pool was installed in the semi-enclosed courtyard behind the canopy, surrounded by a seating area and palm trees. These later additions give the Clevelander a particularly swanky appearance, in spite of the relative austerity of the original design.

I walked along Ocean Drive as far as the southern end of Lummus Park, and then turned inland along 5th Avenue to reach Collins Avenue, which runs parallel to Ocean Drive one block inland. Named after the businessman John S. Collins who played a central role in the early development of the city, Collins Avenue runs the full length of Miami Beach from South Pointe Park to 193rd Street near the boundary with Broward County in the north.  With a hotchpotch of different architectural styles and not so many lush palm trees, it isn’t quite as attractive as Ocean Drive, but is home to some of Miami Beach’s most striking examples of art deco.

Some of the most impressive buildings can be found on the eastern side of the street at the corners of 8th to 11th Streets. Their curved corners, flat roofs, horizontal lines and protruding window shades or “eyebrows” are typical characteristics of the streamline moderne or “nautical moderne” style, which took its inspiration from the aerodynamic design of ocean liners and fast steam locomotives. Several of them are topped with narrow spires or finials bearing the hotels’ original names in neon lettering, which stand out prominently on the skyline. The first of these is the Tiffany Hotel (L. Murray Dixon, 1939), which was rebranded as the “Hotel of South Beach” in the 1990s but has retained its old sign.

On the next street corner is the Sherbrooke Hotel (Mackay and Gibbs, 1947), another streamline moderne building with nautical touches including two circular portholes either side of the main entrance. Streamline moderne is what I think of as typical art deco architecture, although it was actually only one offshoot of the wide-ranging art deco style, which embraced many different influences: cubism, fauvism, Russian constructivism, the German Bauhaus movement and exotic art. Although streamline moderne emerged in the United States in the 1930s, it is familiar to anyone from the UK, as it was widely used in the design of transport facilities such as bus stations, ferry terminals and several London Underground stations. Seaside hotels and leisure amenities were often built in the style, one of the best-known examples being the Aquatic Park Bath House (now the Maritime Museum) in San Francisco.

Another example of streamline moderne in Miami Beach is the Essex House Hotel (1938) at the junction of Collins Avenue and 10th Street, one of the most highly regarded buildings by the prolific Miami-based architect Henry Hohauser. Originally from New York, Hohauser came to Miami Beach in 1932 and designed over 300 buildings in the city. His streamlined, restrained style with limited ornamentation was perhaps a consequence of the Great Depression of the early 1930s and the need to keep construction costs low for the new hotels which were being built to cater for a middle class rather than super-rich clientele.

As I walked past the hotel, a large flock of pelicans flew in formation high above its funnel-like corner spire, accentuating the impression of an ocean liner.

A few blocks further on at the corner of Española Way, I came across another of Hohauser’s buildings. This unusually-shaped building with its intersecting cylindrical towers and rounded corners looks like some sort of transport terminal, but actually opened as Hoffman’s Cafeteria in 1939 and has been owned by various catering establishments since then, most recently becoming a branch of the Mexican-themed bar and grill chain Señor Frogs.

It wasn’t long until dinner time, so I turned inland along Española Way, a shady pedestrian street lined with outdoor cafés and restaurants with a Mediterranean ambience. From there, I meandered through the grid of quiet residential streets to our restaurant, Yardbird, at the junction of 16th Street and Lenox Avenue, where my family were waiting on the street corner. It had been a whistlestop tour of the art deco district, but there had been just enough time to see some of the area’s most distinctive buildings. I had been lucky to have the opportunity to explore the area in brilliant sunshine and blue sky, as soon after we sat down to eat our meal, the weather turned grey and overcast again.