South Beach is small. That is the first thing to understand, and almost everything useful follows from it. The whole subject of this site is the bottom mile and a half of a barrier island: the numbered streets from 1st at South Pointe up to 23rd, where Dade Boulevard and the Collins Canal cut across and Mid-Beach begins. The Atlantic is on the east side, Biscayne Bay on the west, and the distance between them is under a mile. A reasonably fit person can walk from the sand at 10th Street to the bay at Sunset Harbour in twenty minutes, stopping for coffee.
That scale is the reason to plan differently here. You do not need an itinerary that moves you around a city. You need to know which street to be on, and when.
Start with the fact that trips up regularly: this is Miami Beach, not Miami. Two cities, two governments, two police departments, two sets of parking rules, with Biscayne Bay in between and the MacArthur Causeway carrying you across from downtown in fifteen minutes or forty depending on the hour. South Beach is a neighbourhood of Miami Beach. Nothing in Little Havana, Wynwood or Coconut Grove is walkable from here, and anyone who tells you otherwise has never tried it at 6pm on a Friday.
The island's grid is simple once you see it. Four north-south strips do all the work. Ocean Drive carries the deco façades, the sidewalk cafés and the photographs, and runs only from 5th Street to 15th. Collins Avenue one block west is the hotel and retail spine and runs the whole length of the island. Washington Avenue another block west is where the nightclubs, the pharmacies, the laundromats and the city offices are: the working street. Alton Road at the western edge is the car street, the supermarket street, the one you drive on rather than walk. Between Ocean Drive and the water sits Lummus Park, a strip of palms, volleyball nets and paved path, and beyond it the sand.
The buildings are the reason the place is on the National Register. On 14 May 1979 the Miami Beach Architectural District became the first twentieth-century district in the country to be listed, with something in the region of 800 contributing buildings inside boundaries that run from the ocean west to Lenox Court and from 6th Street north to Dade Boulevard. It is the densest concentration of 1920s to 1940s Art Deco anywhere. That listing did not happen by accident: Barbara Baer Capitman and the Miami Design Preservation League, founded in 1976, spent a decade fighting demolition proposals building by building. The pastel colours everyone photographs are not original either. Leonard Horowitz painted the district into lavender, mint and flamingo in the early 1980s; before that it was mostly white and cream.
Then there is the sand, which is wide, public and free, and the lifeguard stands standing on it, each one individually designed and each one named for the street it sits at. They are the island's navigation system and its best-known piece of public design.
What this site does that a city-wide Miami guide cannot is go block by block. Which side of Ocean Drive to walk on at which hour. Which deco lobbies you can wander into without booking anything. Where the sunset is, given that the island faces the wrong way for it. And the honest version of the sidewalk-café economy on Ocean Drive, which is the single most complained-about hundred metres in Florida.
