Washington Avenue

1st to 5th Street. The South of Fifth end. Quieter, more residential, and where the Jewish Museum of Florida sits at 301. 5th Street itself is the causeway feed — four lanes of traffic heading for the MacArthur — and it is the noisiest crossing in South Beach.

5th to 8th. Everyday South Beach: hardware, laundries, small groceries, counter-service Cuban and Argentine food, and the 7th Street municipal garage, which is usually the cheapest parking in the district.

8th to 12th. The cultural stretch. The Wolfsonian at 1001, with its own café and design shop, and the 12th Street garage. Several of the better-value restaurants in South Beach are on these blocks and on the cross streets running east from them.

12th to 14th. The post office at 1300 with the circular lobby, the 13th Street garage, pharmacies, and the supermarket that most visitors staying on Ocean Drive never find.

14th to 17th. Nightclub territory after dark and ordinary shopfronts by day. This is the stretch that gives Washington its reputation, and the reputation is accurate between about midnight and five in the morning and irrelevant the rest of the time.

17th Street and north. The convention centre, the 17th Street garage, Lincoln Road's eastern end at Soundscape Park and the New World Center. Washington effectively terminates as a South Beach street here and becomes a route north.

The useful summary: everything south of 14th is daytime, everything from 14th to 17th is nighttime, and the good museums are in the middle.

If you have time for one indoor hour in South Beach, spend it at 1001 Washington Avenue.

The collection was assembled by Mitchell Wolfson Jr, a Miami Beach native, and it is not an art museum in the ordinary sense. It collects the objects through which the modern world sold itself to people: furniture, appliances, posters, industrial design, architectural fragments, political propaganda, tourism ephemera, machine-age everything, roughly 1850 to 1950. Which means it covers precisely the century that produced the buildings outside the door.

Two consequences. First, the exhibits explain the district better than a walking tour does, because they show you the same design language applied to a radio, a chair, a railway poster and a hotel façade, and the connection becomes obvious. Second, the collection has a spine of genuinely uncomfortable material — propaganda from several regimes, presented as design rather than as decoration — which makes it a serious museum rather than a pleasant one.

The building itself is part of the exhibit: a 1927 storage warehouse with an elaborate Mediterranean Revival frontage, chosen because seasonal residents wanted somewhere secure and imposing to leave the contents of their houses each summer.

There is a café and a design shop at ground level that you can use without a ticket, which makes it a workable rain stop or heat stop even if you are not going in.

Hours and admission change, and the museum has periodically closed galleries for capital work. Check before you build an afternoon around it.