Recovery & Art Deco

What Happened

After the land boom collapsed and the 1926 hurricane flattened much of South Florida, Miami should have simply stalled, like most of the country, through the Depression. Instead Miami Beach did something unusual: it kept building, modestly and cheaply, all through the 1930s. The grand boom-era resort vision was dead, but there was still a market for affordable winter holidays, and a wave of small hotels and apartment buildings went up along Ocean Drive and the surrounding South Beach blocks to serve middle-class tourists who arrived by train and car.

The style they were built in was the new international fashion: Art Deco, and specifically its later, sleeker, nautically-inspired Streamline Moderne variant — rounded corners, racing stripes ("eyebrows"), portholes, terrazzo floors, pastel stucco, and neon. A small group of architects, including Henry Hohauser, L. Murray Dixon, and Albert Anis, designed hundreds of these buildings on tight budgets in a remarkably short span. They were never meant to be monuments; they were inexpensive, of-the-moment, slightly gaudy hotels for people who couldn't afford the Biltmore.

The same decade reshaped who came to the Beach. South Beach became a working- and middle-class Jewish resort and, increasingly, a place of year-round Jewish settlement — the early surge of the Jewish Migration that would define the area for decades. This happened against real resistance: parts of the island had operated under restrictive covenants and "gentile only" policies, so the Jewish South Beach that emerged was a hard-won claim on a place that had tried to exclude it.

Why It Mattered

The accidental genius of this era is that frugality became preservation. Because the Deco hotels were cheap and unpretentious, nobody thought of them as valuable — which is exactly why so many survived into the 1980s to be rediscovered. A wealthier, more confident Miami Beach would have torn them down and rebuilt in the next fashion, the way booming cities always do. Depression-era Miami Beach couldn't afford to, and so it preserved, by neglect, what became the largest collection of 1930s Art Deco architecture anywhere on earth.

That collection is the raw material of Miami's global image. The pastel-and-neon Ocean Drive that stands in for "Miami" in films, fashion shoots, and the popular imagination is this era's product, even though its fame came two generations later. The Versace / South Beach Renaissance of the 1980s and '90s did not invent that look; it rediscovered and monetized what the 1930s built and the preservationists and pioneers of the later century saved. This era is also where the Jewish community that would anchor Miami Beach, and seed so much of Greater Miami's later civic and business life, first took root.

Where You See It Today

You see it on Ocean Drive, in the protected blocks of the Art Deco Historic District — the first 20th-century district placed on the National Register of Historic Places, and the streetscape the whole world reads as Miami. Miami Beach is, in its most photographed precincts, simply this era preserved. The Jewish institutions, delis, and synagogues of the Beach and the later northern suburbs descend from the community that took hold here in the 1930s and '40s. And the Wolfsonian–FIU, the museum of design and propaganda art, sits fittingly in the middle of the district as the scholarly keeper of the era's aesthetic.

Recovery & Art Deco

What Happened

Why It Mattered

Where You See It Today

Further Reading