Miami Beach, Florida

• 1. Introduction

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  Miami Beach sits on a string of natural and human-made barrier islands between the Atlantic Ocean and Biscayne Bay, separated from the mainland city of Miami by a stretch of water that once made the whole place accessible only by ferry. In 1870, a father and son named Henry and Charles Lum paid 75 cents an acre for land here. What they purchased was essentially a jungle-matted sandbar, uninhabited and untamed, with no roads, no hotels, and no future that anyone could easily picture. So how did a place that sold for pocket change per acre become one of America's most recognized resort cities, a cradle of Art Deco architecture, and a home to Nobel laureates, fashion icons, and mobsters in equal measure? The answers run through a wooden bridge that almost went unfinished, a publicist with a billboard in Times Square, a group of elderly activists who stood in front of bulldozers, and the quiet persistence of communities who built something lasting on land that was, not long before, barely above the waterline.

• 2. Building on Sand

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  John S. Collins was not a developer by instinct. He was an agriculturist who came to the barrier islands after buying out the partners of a failed coconut plantation and planting avocados on the land instead. The pine trees on Pinetree Drive were kept not for beauty but as an erosion buffer for his crops. Collins and his family eventually saw the resort potential in what they were farming around, and by 1912 he and his partner Pancoast were digging canals, clearing mangroves, and running the Miami Beach Improvement Company.

  The project that changed everything was a bridge. Collins began building a 2.5-mile wooden span across Biscayne Bay, which would have been the longest wooden bridge in the world at the time. When the money ran out and construction halted, Indianapolis millionaire Carl G. Fisher stepped in. Fisher had recently transplanted himself from Indianapolis to Miami, and he agreed to provide the financing needed to finish the Collins Bridge in exchange for a land deal. The bridge cost over $150,000 and opened on the 12th of June 1913. That land swap triggered the island's first real estate boom.

  Fisher was an organizer as much as a developer. He staged annual speedboat regattas and marketed Miami Beach as an Atlantic City-style retreat for wealthy Northerners. By 1915, Lummus, Collins, Pancoast, and Fisher were all living in mansions on the island. Three hotels and two bathhouses had been built, along with an aquarium and an 18-hole golf course. The Town of Miami Beach was chartered on the 26th of March 1915 and grew to become a city two years later. The place that had cost the Lum family pennies an acre had become, in less than a decade, a destination.

• 3. Selling the Sun

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  Carl Fisher brought a publicist named Steve Hannagan to Miami Beach in 1925. Hannagan set up the Miami Beach News Bureau and told news editors they could print anything they wanted about the city, as long as they got the name right. The bureau sent photographs of bathing beauties and press releases to columnists including Walter Winchell and Ed Sullivan. Hannagan's preferred medium was a billboard in Times Square, New York City, where he ran two slogans: "It's always June in Miami Beach" and "Miami Beach, Where Summer Spends the Winter."

  The target audience was specific. Fisher concentrated his sales pitch on wealthy industrialists from the Northern and Midwestern United States, and built a collection of grand hotels to receive them: The Flamingo Hotel, The Fleetwood Hotel, The Floridian, The Nautilus, and the Roney Plaza Hotel were among the marquee properties. Much of what is now Miami Beach was created during this period by dredging Biscayne Bay, producing Star, Palm, and Hibiscus Islands, the Sunset Islands, much of Normandy Isle, and all of the Venetian Islands except Belle Isle. The Miami Beach peninsula became an island in April 1925 when Haulover Cut was opened, connecting the Atlantic Ocean to the bay north of present-day Bal Harbour.

  Then came the storm. The great 1926 Miami hurricane brought the Florida land boom to an abrupt close and caused significant damage across Miami Beach. The era of grand promotions and grand hotels gave way to something quieter: the small-scale, stucco hotels and rooming houses built for seasonal rental in the 1930s, which now form the core of the Art Deco historic district.

• 4. The Jewish City

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  Antisemitism was not an undercurrent in early Miami Beach; it was policy. Developer Carl Fisher sold property only to gentiles, which meant Jewish residents were required to live south of Fifth Street. As recently as the 1930s, hotels on the island refused Jewish guests. The shift came as the 1930s wore on and restrictions on Jewish real estate ownership began to be dismantled. By the 1940s and 1950s, an increasing number of Jewish families were building hotels. The first structure called a skyscraper on the island was the 18-story Lord Tarleton Hotel, built in 1940 by Samuel Jacobs.

  During World War II, Jewish doctors were denied staff privileges at local hospitals, so the community built its own: Mount Sinai Medical Center on Miami Beach. The North Shore Jewish Center was built in 1951 and expanded into Temple Menorah in 1963. The sun and warm climate drew Jewish families and retirees in large numbers, and a demographer from the University of Miami estimated that there might have been as many as 70,000 Jewish residents at the community's peak. By 1980-62 percent of Miami Beach's population was Jewish.

  The 1980s brought migration outward to places like Delray Beach, Lake Worth, and Boca Raton. By 1999, only around 10,000 Jewish people were living in Miami Beach. Nobel Prize-winning writer Isaac Bashevis Singer lived in the northern end of Miami Beach until his death in 1991 and regularly had breakfast at Sheldon's drugstore on Harding Avenue. The Holocaust Memorial of the Greater Miami Jewish Federation and the Jewish Museum of Florida both stand in the city today as permanent markers of that community's presence and loss.

• 5. Fighting the Bulldozers

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  By the 1970s, jet travel had opened the Caribbean to American tourists, and Miami Beach's older economy was struggling. South Beach's population was dominated by elderly retirees with little money, and city planners and developers proposed bulldozing much of the aging Art Deco district to make way for new development. At one count, the city held over 800 Art Deco buildings within its borders, most of them the small stucco hotels built for seasonal rental in the 1930s.

  In 1976, a former interior designer named Barbara Baer Capitman and a group of activists formed the Miami Design Preservation League to fight the demolitions. After years of confrontations with developers and federal bureaucrats in Washington, the MDPL achieved its central goal in 1979: the Miami Beach Art Deco Historic District was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The recognition did not legally prevent demolition, but it drew national attention to the buildings.

  With that attention came visitors and film crews. The 1984 NBC television series Miami Vice filmed across Miami and Miami Beach for five seasons. Ocean Drive appeared prominently in the 1983 film Scarface and the 1996 comedy The Birdcage. Investors including Tony Goldman and Ian Schrager bought deteriorating Art Deco hotels and turned them into celebrated destinations. In 1986, after years of MDPL marches and candlelight vigils, the Miami Beach city commission created the first two historic preservation districts, covering Espanola Way and most of Ocean Drive and Collins Avenue. On the 15th of July 1997, fashion designer Gianni Versace was killed at Casa Casuarina on Ocean Drive, a property that had itself been restored as part of the neighborhood's revival. Barbara Baer Capitman, who died in 1990, has a street in the District named in her honor.

• 6. Arts and Water

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  Jackie Gleason moved his television show to Miami Beach in 1964, reportedly because he wanted year-round access to the golf course at the Inverrary Country Club in Lauderhill. His show ran at the Miami Beach Auditorium, later renamed the Jackie Gleason Theatre of the Performing Arts and now known as Fillmore Miami Beach. His closing line became a kind of standing joke about the arrangement: "As always, the Miami Beach audience is the greatest audience in the world." CBS canceled the series in 1970.

  The New World Symphony was established in Miami Beach in 1987 under the artistic direction of Michael Tilson Thomas. In January 2011, the orchestra moved into a new building designed by Frank Gehry, the Canadian-American Pritzker Prize-winning architect known for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. The building includes a 7,000-square-foot projection wall for outdoor performances at the Miami Beach SoundScape.

  Each December since 2002, the city hosts Art Basel Miami Beach at the Miami Beach Convention Center. The 2017 edition drew around 250 galleries; attendance at the 2016 fair reached approximately 77,000 people. The city also sits at low elevation, averaging only 4.4 feet above mean sea level, and parts of the western side of South Beach sit at virtually zero feet above the high-tide line. A five-year, $500 million infrastructure project launched to address this vulnerability, installing 60 to 80 pumps and raising some streets and sidewalks about 2.5 feet. The first four pumps were installed in 2014, each capable of moving 4,000 gallons of water per minute. A survey published in June 2025 found that 79 percent of Miami Beach residents support extending the Metromover rail line to the city, a project that has been in planning documents since 2002.