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Around 800 buildings in these twenty-three blocks were listed on the National Register of Historic Places on 14 May 1979, as the first twentieth-century urban historic district in the United States. It is the largest concentration of Art Deco architecture anywhere. None of that was inevitable. In the 1970s the accepted view of this neighbourhood was that it was a slum of obsolete small hotels occupied by elderly retirees, and the obvious thing to do with it was knock it down.
What stopped that was a campaign run largely out of a woman's apartment. Barbara Baer Capitman, a design journalist who moved here in the 1970s, founded the Miami Design Preservation League with the industrial designer Leonard Horowitz in 1976. At a state hearing in December 1978 she proposed a district of roughly 1,200 buildings. She got the listing. She did not get protection, because a National Register listing is largely honorary and does not stop a private owner demolishing a private building. The next twelve years were spent fighting building by building, and she lost some of them.
What you are actually looking at
Three styles, side by side
Three styles sit side by side here and telling them apart is most of the pleasure.
Mediterranean Revival, the 1920s land-boom style: arches, clay tile roofs, rough stucco, wrought iron, asymmetry. Art Deco and Streamline Moderne, the 1930s rebuild after the 1926 hurricane and through the Depression: flat roofs, smooth stucco, hard geometry, symmetry. MiMo, post-war Miami Modern, which mostly sits north of this district.
The vocabulary
The deco vocabulary is small and once you have it you see it everywhere on Ocean Drive:
- The rule of three. Façades divide into three vertical bays, with three windows, three fins, three racing stripes. Count them.
- Eyebrows. Cantilevered concrete shelves over the windows. They are sunshades, not decoration, and they are the single most South Beach detail there is.
- Ziggurats and finials. The stepped central parapet rising above the roofline, sometimes with a spire.
- Racing stripes, glass block, porthole windows, curved corners, terrazzo floors, etched glass, chrome and neon.
- Tropical Deco, the local mutation: flamingos, herons, palms, sunbursts and nautical motifs cut into the plaster in place of the chevrons you would get in New York.
The pastels are a 1980s decision
One thing to get straight before you start. The pastels are not original. Photographs from the 1930s show a district in white and cream with a little muted trim, chosen to bounce heat. The pinks, mints and lavenders were Leonard Horowitz's work in the 1980s, a deliberate act of marketing and revival. People argue about it to this day. Knowing it is a 1980s costume makes the walk more interesting, not less.
The route
Start at the Art Deco Welcome Center, 1001 Ocean Drive, on the corner of 10th. Walk south to 5th, turn and walk north to 14th, then cut west and come back down Washington. About two miles, two hours at a proper pace, three if you go into lobbies. Do it before eleven in the morning: the light is on the façades, the awnings are not yet full, and nobody tries to seat you.
| # | Stop | Address | Built | Look for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Art Deco Welcome Center | 1001 Ocean Dr | 1930s | Former Beach Patrol headquarters; nautical moderne, portholes |
| 2 | Waldorf Towers | 860 Ocean Dr | 1937, Albert Anis | The ornamental corner lighthouse tower |
| 3 | Park Central | 640 Ocean Dr | 1937, Henry Hohauser | Vertical blue fins; go into the lobby |
| 4 | Colony Hotel | 736 Ocean Dr | 1935, Hohauser | The neon sign. The most photographed façade on the street |
| 5 | Breakwater | 940 Ocean Dr | 1939, Anton Skislewicz | Stepped central tower, vertical sign, racing stripes |
| 6 | Edison | 960 Ocean Dr | 1935, Hohauser | Mediterranean-leaning deco; the arcade |
| 7 | Clevelander | 1020 Ocean Dr | 1938, Anis | Curved corner, glass block |
| 8 | Congress | 1052 Ocean Dr | 1936, Hohauser | Deep eyebrows, textbook rule of three |
| 9 | Casa Casuarina | 1116 Ocean Dr | 1930 | Not deco. Mediterranean Revival, and the exception that proves the street |
| 10 | The Tides | 1220 Ocean Dr | 1936, L. Murray Dixon | Ten storeys; the tallest on Ocean Drive when it opened |
| 11 | Leslie | 1244 Ocean Dr | 1937, Anis | Butter yellow, three bays, no balconies by design |
| 12 | The Carlyle | 1250 Ocean Dr | 1939, Kiehnel & Elliott | Three vertical fins and a rounded prow |
| 13 | Cardozo | 1300 Ocean Dr | 1939, Hohauser | Streamline at its purest: wrapped eyebrows, no ornament |
| 14 | Cavalier | 1320 Ocean Dr | 1936, Roy France | Vertical bas-relief panels cut into the stucco |
| 15 | Marlin | 1200 Collins Ave | 1939, Dixon | Lavender, curved, the quiet star of Collins |
| 16 | Essex House | 1001 Collins Ave | 1938, Hohauser | A ship's prow on a street corner, with a neon spire |
| 17 | The Wolfsonian–FIU | 1001 Washington Ave | 1927 | Built as a furniture warehouse; now a museum of the period itself |
| 18 | Old City Hall | 1130 Washington Ave | 1927, Martin L. Hampton | Mediterranean Revival tower, out of scale with everything |
| 19 | Post Office | 1300 Washington Ave | 1937, H. L. Cheney | Depression Moderne rotunda. Walk in and look up |
Stop 19 is not the end of the walk
Finish at 1201 Collins Avenue, one block east of the post office.
The Senator Hotel stood here. Hohauser, 1939, one of his best. It was demolished on 13 October 1988 to make room for parking. The Save the Senator campaign ran for months; Capitman was seventy-eight and had been sitting on the porch, and on the morning of the 12th the police carried her off it. She died two years later.
Stand on that corner for a minute. Everything else on this list is standing because that fight was mostly won, and this corner is what losing looked like. The New Yorker, another Hohauser, had gone the same way in 1981. It is the most useful stop on the walk and there is nothing to photograph.
Going inside
Lobbies are the part people skip. Several restored hotels on Ocean Drive and Collins keep original terrazzo, etched glass, plaster reliefs and lobby murals, and walking in to look at them is entirely normal behaviour in South Beach. Nobody will stop you. Buy a coffee if you feel awkward.
Two genuinely public interiors: the Post Office rotunda at 1300 Washington, with its oculus and its Depression-era mural, and the Wolfsonian–FIU at 1001 Washington, which collects the propaganda, furniture and industrial design of exactly the years this district was built. There is no better forty minutes of context available on the island.
If you would rather be told
The Miami Design Preservation League runs the official guided walk from the Welcome Center at 1001 Ocean Drive, usually a mid-morning departure of about ninety minutes, with an evening departure later in the week. Adult tickets sit in the mid-thirties, with a reduced student and senior rate, and a self-guided audio version is available for rather less in several languages. Times, prices and languages change; check mdpl.org the week you go. The guides are volunteers and trained preservationists, and the fee goes to the organisation that saved the buildings you are looking at.
Every January the same organisation runs Art Deco Weekend, a free street festival on Ocean Drive that has been going since the late 1970s. It is the one weekend the street belongs to the buildings again.
Doing this walk without suffering
Go before 11am. Ocean Drive faces east, so the morning sun lights the façades directly and the afternoon leaves them flat and grey. It is also cooler, quieter, and the café hosts have not started working the pavement.
Walk the Lummus Park side, not the café side. You cannot see a three-storey façade from underneath its own awning. Cross to the park, walk north, look left.
Shade is scarce and the walk is two miles. Water, a hat, and shoes you can do stairs in. From June to September, either finish by 11am or start after 5pm, and accept that an afternoon thunderstorm is likely.
Bring a phone charger. You will take more photographs than you expect, and there is no shade to check your battery in.
Look up, and look down. The best deco detail is above the first floor, where the signage stops. The second best is under your feet: original terrazzo survives in doorways and lobby thresholds all along Collins.
Why the district nearly went, and what saved it
By the late 1960s South Beach had the highest concentration of elderly residents in the United States, many of them retirees living cheaply in small hotels built for a 1930s holiday trade that had moved north to the big Collins Avenue resorts. The buildings were forty years old, unfashionable, and sitting on beachfront land. Redevelopment plans of the era proposed clearing much of the area outright.
The National Register listing in 1979 changed the economics rather than the law. It made restoration eligible for federal tax advantages and low-interest loans, which is what actually persuaded owners to repair rather than replace. Horowitz's colour scheme gave the district a look you could photograph. Then television did the rest: a police series shot here between 1984 and 1989 put these façades in front of a global audience every week, and the property values that followed made demolition financially stupid in a way that argument never had.
Local protection came afterwards, through city historic districts and a design review process, which is why you now cannot repaint a façade here without permission. The order matters. The listing did not save these buildings. It bought enough time for the money to change its mind.
Last updated
Opening hours, ordinances and prices move with the season. We re-check this guide rather than rewrite it, and the date above is the last time someone did. How we research and correct.
