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The Miamians Art Deco Now

South Beach, that’s mean the southern end of the island city of Miami Beach, must be one of the hippest places on earth.  The district which has the largest collection of Art Deco architecture, displayed on numerous apartments, hotels and other buildings, were built between 1923 and 1943.  Now, what for years was called South Beach is often referred to as SoBe.  Style is the thing here.

The epicenter of SoBe is the Art Deco district, officially situated between 6^th street and 23^rd street and from Ocean Drive west to Lenox Avenue.  Here, a new club or restaurant opens almost every week.  And each week, it seems, a dowdy old residential hotel is spruced up and reopened as a tourist hotel.  

The best way to see SoBe’s art deco is definitely not by car, even though you have the Britax Boulevard 70CS for your kid on your car.  What you should do is still the way tourists did when it was new: by walking.  You can amble along Ocean Drive under the coconut palms and gaze at the facades: the peaches-and-cream Bacon hotel, with its racing stripes and ornamental plaques; the nautical blue-and-white Park Central Hotel with a row of porthole windows above its fluted tin marquee; the Venetian style Locust Apartments with their arched gothic windows.

Pick one of the many open-air cafes that spill out toward the beach, order a lemonade and take a people-watching break.  You might see a family from Anchorage strolling past a bathing-suited couple from Italy, or a pair of a Miamians sitting on a bench next to a stylish businessman eating his lunch with his stylish Nintendo New 3DS on his palm.   If you turn your head for a second maybe he had gone to the nearest building, looking for an all-in-one printer.  

South Beach became the country’s middle-class Riviera, home to the world’s largest concentration of art deco architecture.   Some 300 of its 1,800 buildings have now been restored in a square mile of what was, only 80 years ago, an untamed barrier island.  The district has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1979.

Yet South Beach is only recently trendy.  By the late sixties the entire area had gone dowdy, and by the seventies crime had become a serious problem.  But in the early eighties the inevitable gentrification began, the smart money driving out the Jewish retirees on fixed incomes who for years had predominated.

The deco style is so venerated that Kentucky Fried Chicken built its South Beach store with a deco look, adding fast food to the cosmopolitan fare that is more typical here.   Within a few blocks are restaurants offering nouvelle cuisine, Tuscan, American Cafe, Southwest chic, Cajun, Cuban, Mexican, Spanish, sushi, kosher; and now a forties diner hauled to Washington Avenue from Pennsylvania.  Prices are higher than in the forties, of course.     

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