Miami's South Beach

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MIAMI BEACH: South Beach Commercial Buildings and Streets

Miami Beach is a great little city.

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It’s one of the very few small cities to have survived in North America. This puts it in the distinguished company of Charleston, Annapolis, Quebec, and maybe Santa Fe and Savannah. Other North American cities of this size have been damaged to the point where they don’t function as pedestrian environments.

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According to the 2000 census, 87,933 people live in the 7.03 square miles inside the Miami Beach city limits, for a city-limit density of 12,508—a bit more than Boston.

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Its diverse and interesting population, its beach and nightlife, its shopping and dining opportunities and its cosmopolitan aura leave visitors thinking it’s unique and full of character, but most of all these days, it’s noted for its Deco architecture:

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The City of Miami Beach is divided into North Beach, which is dense and suburban, and South Beach, which is even denser and thoroughly urban.

SOUTH BEACH

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The South Beach zip code is 33139. Within its 2.60 square miles live 40,177 permanent residents (2003), yielding a density of 15,472 persons per square mile, about the same as San Francisco. This surprising figure is achieved despite swaths of hotels and a large business district with few permanent residents. And it’s achieved principally with two and three story buildings, both commercial and residential, that are mostly free-standing. It resembles Cambridge, MA in this regard.

South Beach looked like this in 1989:

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Where are the back yards?

It was built mostly in the Great Depression. Just getting started in 1930, it looked like this:

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Even today, few highrises interrupt the consistent three-story scale of South Beach, except at the very southern edge, from which this photo was taken:

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Photo from SSP

South Beach contains the nation’s largest historic district; at one square mile, it surpasses Boston’s South End in size:

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Michelin.

South Beach adheres to a grid, like most of Manhattan, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Chicago or Charleston. The east-west streets are numbered for the visitor’s easy orientation, while the less-numerous north-south avenues bear names. Each of the first three avenues in from the beach can fairly claim Main Street status, though for different reasons.

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Running along the broad beach, the easternmost avenue is Ocean Drive (sometimes known as Deco Drive), the main drag for tourists and beachgoers, lined with hotels and restaurants. This is Miami Beach’s raison d’etre, the symbolic and economic core.

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The scene here reaches a crescendo Saturday nights, when it becomes a parade of musclemen, belly buttons, anacondas and supercars:

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Sunday morning on Ocean Drive.

[Fabrizio]

Great, informative photo essay (as always).

I would love to see these same shots taken 25 years ago.

This is also what was mentioned in another thread. Its not always about individual buildings... its about groups of buildings.

Compare this hustle-n-bustle to other parts of Miami with those new skyscapers in parks.

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Next comes Collins Avenue, lined with hotels and restaurants, which are joined by chic boutiques. It’s the main drag where locals and tourists rub shoulders, and it’s also a state highway, sometimes heavy with traffic:

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Convertible by Bentley.

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Can you spot the parking?

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Washington Avenue is the residents’ main drag: an everyday shopping street bracketed in the north by a small porno district and in the south by clubs (ah, those clubs…). At the northern end it resembles a busy street in Queens, with groceries, bistros and a hardware store; the southern end, with its cafes, may remind you of Italy:

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The main drag where the locals shop.

A glitzy bus stop and a dull office tower at Washington Avenue and Lincoln Mall. This building makes me grateful new structures in the South Beach historic district are built in Deco style, rather than International Style Modernism, which reduces all places to the same place: anyplace. “International,” after all, is the opposite of “local:”

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“Local” is Deco:

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South and west of the historic district, big new non-Deco bayside condos introduce another scale that looks good from a distance but meets the ground plane in anti-urban fashion:

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Photo from SSP.

At the other end of town, standard North Beach highrises loom above the strand:

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Big buildings materialized on the Beach itself in 1947 with the primo Hotel Delano, shown here on a deserted early Sunday morning beach, waiting for a thunderstorm. The Delano was recently reconceived by that guru of glitz, French hotel architect Philippe Starck. This may be the city’s most desirable digs.

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THE LOOK

South Beach is for people who like to look. Whether you like to look at people or buildings, you’ll be equally rewarded:

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Here you may also enjoy looking at cars:

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Refugee from Cuba? A ’60 “Dodge Imperial.”

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Boys on a cruise in the Azure by Bentley. Just a bit more than 400k will get you one too.

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My personal predilection is looking at cityscape, ensembles of buildings that delight the eye:

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Deco!

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The Cardozo, named for the Roosevelt-era Supreme Court justice, and owned by Gloria Estefan. Emerson made a radio that was its spitting image.

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Deco Revival, just five-or-so years old (left), added to the real thing (right):

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Wait a minute…they’re both the real thing! What difference does it make when they were built?

Some more Deco Revival. The five-story height also gives it away:

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Elevator tower hurts the symmetry.

And yet two more:

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Late Deco morphs into International Style around the time Gropius comes to America in the Forties; this one also exceeds the usual three stories:

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Around this time, things start to look a little cheap (Gropius would say “economical”), and ground floors start to get a bit chaotic as the car muscles in, relegating pedestrian access to a kind of pit:

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Converted office building makes a somewhat downmarket hotel

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’56 Dodge.

Neo-deco Jewish deli, built to look like it was always there. The establishment may have been, but the building’s new:

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An original:

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Showtime. Note the ristorante.

And another:

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Lincoln Theatre, a converted movie house and now home of the New World Symphony Orchestra, Michael Tilson-Thomas, conductor. He also conducts the San Francisco Symphony.

As in Manhattan, Miami Beach gives you that genuine big city rush of the unexpected when you venture out for a ramble. I happened on the Lincoln Theatre at noon, and the orchestra was rehearsing Dvorak’s eponymous New World Symphony with a Czech conductor. The orchestra’s musicians are all in their twenties; big-city orchestras like the Chicago Symphony get their fresh blood here. They’re too young to be thinking about work rules and contracts, so they are here to play their hearts out. What I heard that afternoon was quite simply the best orchestral playing I have ever heard: better than the New York Philharmonic, better than the Boston Symphony, and as good as the Vienna Philharmonic. Pretty good for free:

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Modernism tiptoed in behind Deco in Miami Beach:

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A Modernist relationship to the sidewalk, like a sixties apartment building in Manhattan.

Hybrid:

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Modern detailing; but symmetrical massing, like most Deco buildings.

Crude Revivalism:

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A little of this, a little of that.

Fifties Revivalism verges on parody (clunky as that SUV):

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Grotesque Revivalism:

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Pretty obvious what that is.

The newest building, however, is the one that strives to look the oldest:

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Florida Spanish Revival. Shades of Robert Stern?

It also actually touches its neighbor at ground level, something earlier buildings scrupulously avoid. They must have changed the zoning. Still, this makes pretty good townscape. More Fifties Revival next door, foreground:

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Actually, Spanish, Mediterranean, whatever you want to call it, is this city’s second most prevalent style. It was most common in the Twenties, just before Deco:

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Also Spanish and from the Twenties is downtown’s sole skyscraper (City Hall):

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A Plateresque chapel:

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And a hotel:

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There’s a whole little Spanish-style district, centered on a street called Espanola Way:

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Weekends, parking’s restricted and this turns into a street market. Early morning, vendors set up tents and tables where weekdays people park:

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The scene here takes on the sunbaked hues of Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic:

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Caribbean life:

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Diminutive scale skates at the edge of the Disneyesque:

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Italian-style colonization of sidewalk:

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A few really high class Spanish style mansions survive from the Twenties, including one on Ocean Drive. The influence is Mizner, and the material is native coral:

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Even older, and also of coral, some vernacular architecture (once a house) rendered a little grotesque by the recent handrail code:

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Espanola Way is cozy and cute, but the big money’s made at Lincoln Mall:

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This used to be a street, but they replaced the roadway with vegetation and café tables:

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Reminds me of Italy:

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Must remind the café proprietors too, since they’re mostly Italian:

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You can trust an Italian to pick a café chair; he’s got that touch:

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Many of the shopkeepers are Italian too; can you tell from the black clothes?

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Is it a Power Center?

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Is it New Urbanism?

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Early morning Saturday and already packed. Wait till everyone sits down for lunch:

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The street’s Deco, and it’s been closed to cars for a long time, as you can tell from the size of the trees:

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There used to be car dealers:

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Cadillac/LaSalle dealership makes a nifty café if you add a skylight:

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Cross streets are not interrupted by the mall, so you regularly encounter cars slinking by at 3 mph:

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And the theater still operates:

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And so does a hotel:

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Not like the mall back home. Is it a mall at all?

Well…one thing it shares with all malls—it has a service area:

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A PRETTY NICE STRETCH OF MODERNISM

Collins Avenue, the beachfront main drag, ends in a Chinese wall of high rises:

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These are clustered a little incongruously around a flight of steps leading to a plaza. Here the beach ceases to be public and becomes the private domain of those big North Beach blockbusters. Thus, those glitzy new high rises mark the symbolic beginning of the North Beach sphere of influence. In addition, they make a pretty good case for the decorative potential of Modernist architecture:

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These buildings borrow elements from Deco’s vocabulary --portholes and eyebrows—and combine them with Modernist massing and machine order. Here South Beach blends with North, both geographically and architecturally:

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Eye candy on Ocean Drive’s northernmost blocks: these buildings really look good, but what they give to the city and the street is chiefly detail to keep your eyes entertained; their urban gestures leave a little to be desired. Why, for example, the flight of steps removing the outdoor seating area from sidewalk level?

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STREETS

As in any real city, people walk in Miami Beach. This is partly because it’s desirable and partly because it’s unavoidable. It’s desirable because there are almost no parking lots (and so the streetwall’s continuous and things aren’t separated); and its unavoidable because there are almost no parking lots (and so you can’t park at your destination unless there’s a vacant meter alongside).

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Collins Avenue.

Though the streetwall seems continuous, there are actually small gaps between buildings:

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Collins Avenue.

This allows fenestration of sidewalls and deep buildings that extend all the way to their rear property lines. Most unusual:

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Collins Avenue.

Those spaces between buildings are often developed as linear courtyards, sometimes shared:

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And sometimes divvied up from front to back:

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As buildings are built all the way from front property lines to rear, you’ll find alleys to access the rears:

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San Juan?

A brand new poured concrete neo-Deco looms over an old Spanish style mansion on Ocean Drive, as $350,000 worth of understated automotive opulence glides by in the form of a Maybach:

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Climate and passersby encourage sidewalk colonization:

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On Ocean Drive this is accomplished by serving across public circulation to curbside tables:

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This allows interaction with both pedestrians and the sharks in their Lamborghinis. Saturday night the resulting congestion is truly exhilarating; you wouldn’t believe the interaction. You have to be a drip not to come away with a trophy.

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Or—seated at your café table on your hotel’s pedestal—you can find yourself at eye level with the passersby:

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Even on Collins Street:

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A TWENTIETH CENTURY CITY, full of urban architecture, not too sober:

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…even the newest stuff:

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Not just urban, but urbane:

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TRAILER…

Further threads will feature people…

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…demographics…

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…residential areas and architecture…

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…everyday life…

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…streets…

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…transport…

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… and garages (yes).

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Deco vs. Modern: which is the real Twentieth Century style?

[212]

Knockout of a tour, ablarc.
The cityscape is every bit as photogenic as NYC's ... and the locals moreso.

[ablarc]

Compare this hustle-n-bustle to other parts of Miami with those new skyscapers in parks.
It's worth noting in this regard that Miami Beach is not part of Miami. Miami Beach's urbanity is kept in place by imaginative and unusual --actually unique-- zoning, like Carmel. By contrast, Miami's suburban sprawl is generated by the usual sunbelt zoning garbage, which is why it's no more walkable than Houston or Raleigh.

The cityscape is every bit as photogenic as NYC's ... and the locals moreso.
Ain't it though ...!

[MidtownGuy]

Oh my, ablarc... I don't know what to say! Thank you for this endeavor! Magnificent photos, you've captured it masterfully. And delightful, instructive commentary to boot. I was working all day and night, and when I finally took a wiredNY break, I was rewarded with this amazing thread.
Your pictures of Espanola Way brought back hilarious memories of the time I stayed at the Clay Hostel, in town for a protest and on a strict budget.
I love Miami Beach. It's my second favorite place in the US.

[ablarc]

The cityscape is every bit as photogenic as NYC's ... and the locals moreso.

GOOD BODIES, LARD ASSES, LONG LIVES AND CITY LIVING

Miami Beach:

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Miami Beach doesn’t look much like the rest of the country. For starters, Miami Beach is a real city in which people walk to go shopping or to work. Another reason is that in Miami Beach the inhabitants are mostly in good shape.

The good-body demographic groups in Miami are: a.) professional models, both female and male, both straight and gay; and b.) hangers-on, who are there because they are attracted by group “a” and need good bodies of their own for credibility with their marks.

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A pit bull and his dog

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Peculiar to Miami Beach is an extremely large population of Italians: upper-middle-class, young and stylish Italians from Northern Italy, some immigrants and some pro tem entrepreneurs—not the descendants of poor Sicilians we are used to thinking of as Italians in such cities as Boston, Philadelphia and San Francisco. These Italians are in Miami Beach because of demographic groups “a” and “b” and because they like the stylishness and urbanity of Miami Beach; it is a real city and it reminds them of home. (It reminds me of Italy). One of these expatriate Italian fashion-mongers was famously murdered by his lover.

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Italians have set the style for South Beach. This is why you will see so many Miami Beach residents of both sexes wearing black. Those in colorful t-shirts and cut-off jeans are tourists; you can also recognize them from their flab.

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Tourists:

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This man didn’t want his picture taken. Maybe that isn’t his wife.

In San Francisco, I believe that the biggest impetus for the goodbody culture comes from gays. The topography definitely plays a part; it makes inadvertent exercisers of all San Franciscans; aerobics without the boredom.

That this all translates into better health is beyond dispute; numerous studies reveal enhanced life expectancies for such places as San Francisco and (of course, if you think about it!) New York, where people walk. This has become an argument for New Urbanism.

For a little anecdotal evidence, here is a photo taken at Boston’s Quincy Market, an in-town suburban shopping mall to which suburbanites flock, especially on weekends. Here they are on Easter weekend:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/goodbodies/12.jpg

Can you find a single person over ten years old who is not overweight?

* * *

LARD ASSES AND LONG LIFE


In the United States we are not only lard asses, but we pay for it with our lives.

The CIA lists 225 countries and almost-countries on its website, and gives you the statistical skinny on them all. The CIA will give you the facts by country or ranked in tables by category.

Here is the CIA’s table of top 48 countries ranked by life expectancy, out of 225. The United States is number 48. This means there are 47 countries in which the average person lives longer than in the United States, including Macau, Japan, Australia, Canada, the Cayman Islands, Italy, France, Spain, Israel, Greece, Germany, New Zealand, Britain, Bermuda, Cyprus and Jordan (Jordan!!)—and even including our own territories of Virgin Islands, Guam and Puerto Rico.

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/stats/01.jpg

The table shows that the average Andorran lives 6.4 years longer than the average American.

While life expectancy is increasing in almost all countries, including the U.S., we drop further down the list each year—this in spite of our Gross Domestic Product per capita (wealth) of $36,200 (adjusted), last year the second highest in the world after Luxembourg’s $48,900.

At right in the table, I have tabulated the CIA’s figures for GDP per capita (and rank, out of 225) for each longer-lived country. Third-in-longevity San Marino, for example, enjoys a per-capita GDP of $34,600—making its inhabitants fifth in the world in this measure of prosperity.

I have highlighted the top ten wealthy countries in red in the “Rank” column. This shows that at this level there is some correlation between wealth and longevity—though far less than you might expect: 160th-ranked Saint Helena, 145th-ranked Montserrat and 132nd-ranked Jordan all enjoy longer life expectancy than the USA, which is ranked second in GDP per capita. Populations of all of the world’s top ten prosperous countries live longer than Americans.

This is in spite of the fact that Americans are said to have the world’s best doctors, hospitals and medical equipment, and in spite of the fact that on the whole Americans smoke less than people in other countries.

Americans are, however, fat. The government says 60% of the residents of this fair land are overweight, and casual observation of a crowd confirms this dour assessment. Americans overeat, consume too much junk food and don’t get the exercise to walk it off. Instead, we cruise Suburbia in our cars, because that is the kind of habitat we have created with zoning.

This alone is insufficient to fully explain America’s poor performance in life expectancy. Canada, for example, is #11 in longevity to the US’s #48, despite the fact that all of the foregoing observations about nutrition and exercise also apply to Canada.

The difference, of course, is that America’s broken health insurance shambles regularly denies some people paid access to the health care they need to stay alive, while Canadians mostly get the care they need. In the US, people die prematurely because they have no health insurance and hence don’t go to the doctor in a timely fashion, or because they have switched from one greedy, profit-grubbing insurance company to another—only to find that their heart condition is now a pre-existing condition, and their much-needed and expensive valve replacement operation is not covered. They can’t cough up a couple of years’ salary, so they die instead.

The bottom 48 on the CIA’s longevity list looks like this:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/stats/02.jpg

Most populations that die young inhabit the wretched countries of sub-Saharan Africa, and here you can find a pretty strong correlation between poverty and early death. The exceptions are relatively prosperous South Africa ($10,000 GDP per capita), Namibia and Botswana. These countries are in the throes of a raging AIDS epidemic, and South Africa has such a high murder rate that it must show up somewhat in the life expectancy figure.

[ablarc]

I would love to see these same shots taken 25 years ago.
Don't have those, but maybe I can jog your memory. You most likely stayed in North Beach 25 years ago:



SUBURBS OF SOUTH BEACH

Folks in most of North America think a place is urban if the buildings are big. Actually, urban places are ones where people walk, and suburban places are ones where they don’t. New Yorkers know this: Greenwich Village, where you’ll find mostly small buildings, is as urban as the rest of Manhattan.

This is pretty obvious in Paris or Miami Beach, in both of which the suburbs actually have bigger buildings than the city and fairly high density, but nobody walks.

According to the 2000 census, 87,933 people live in the 7.03 square miles inside the Miami Beach city limits, for an overall city-limit density of 12,508—a bit more than Boston.

South Beach, the urban part where people walk: within its 2.60 square miles live 40,177 permanent residents (2003), yielding a density of 15,472 persons per square mile, about the same as San Francisco.

That leaves the suburban remainder, also known as North Beach: 4.43 square miles and 47,756 residents, for a density of 10,780. Pretty high, huh? Especially for a suburb.

That’s higher than any of the faux-cities of the sunbelt, including of course Miami, which with the clear-eyed vision of a European we would have to declare a suburb of South Beach. The census bureau doesn’t see it that way, but you know what the census bureau is full of; they’re the ones who regaled us with the [oxy]moronic “urban sprawl,” till they changed their definitions.

* * *

Nobody on this forum still believes in urban sprawl or the tooth fairy, and everyone here knows what the look of Miami Beach is, but older people and many who have never been can be forgiven for thinking Miami Beach looks like this:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miabch/02.jpg
North Miami Beach.

If you had come to Miami Beach twenty-five years ago, you probably also would have left thinking it looked like this. The reason: North Beach, with its vast Brazilian slabs was then the only respectable part of town-- out there in Suburbia, where nobody walked.

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miabch/02a.jpg

Densely built-out but completely suburban North Beach, home of the fabled Fontainebleau and Eden Roc megaresorts: here, in each building-as-city you got a private stretch of patrolled sand and a fully self-contained resort environment, complete with hairdresser, gift shops, oceanfront pool, bars, restaurants, coffee shops and maybe a night club.

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miabch/02b.jpg

Canals and artificial islands abound in North Beach:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miabch/02d.jpg

Everyone arrives in a vehicle: guests in cars, hotel workers in buses:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miabch/02e.jpg

Wealth on the water backed by what could be taken for commie blocks:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miabch/02f.jpg
Btw, how much is that yacht?

North Beach; the Fontainebleau is the concave building:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miabch/02g.jpg
Photo from SSP.

The stepped conical spire at left marks the end of urban South Beach, and the beginning of suburban North Beach, with its megablocks galumphing up the skinny sandbar to distant Fort Lauderdale; Miami Beach resembles Paris in that the high rises are outside the central city. Big green area is a country club and villas for plutocrats:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miabch/02h.jpg
Photo from SSP.

It was all so Fifties-- like Las Vegas with a beach as the principal attraction in place of gaming tables. There was not a soul on the sidewalk; each hyperdense beachfront building was a spaceship that nobody left for the duration of their stay. You could arrive by taxi from the airport and never leave your hotel grounds until it was time to take the cab back to your plane:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miabch/03.jpg

If you asked your cabbie on the way to drive you through old, decrepit South Miami Beach where you heard there were some little old decaying buildings from the Thirties, he would flat refuse. Too risky to even drive through: that was the turf of drug dealers, prostitutes, carjackers, squeegee artists, welfare mothers and perverts. South of 18th Street it looked dangerous, and the crime statistics proved it was. On fixed incomes, a few old Jews from the Boroughs reputedly cowered there among the litter and detritus, though how they survived was mysterious. To a cabbie, driving through South Miami Beach was like riding through the Serengeti on a bicycle: too foolhardy to even contemplate.

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miabch/03a.gif

[ablarc]

But, swelling with pride, your cabbie would be more than pleased to show you to the mansions of the toffs, above Dade Boulevard, safe behind their gates on lush and verdant lanes, most of which back up to canals or Biscayne Bay:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miabch/03b.jpg

He would show you the lifestyles of the rich and famous:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miabch/03c.jpg
959?

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miabch/03d.jpg

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miabch/03e.jpg

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miabch/03g.jpg

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miabch/03h.jpg

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miabch/03i.jpg
Modernism’s forte was really the single-family house; the paucity of detail was in scale with the smallish masses of a residence. Too bad the modern house never caught on except among the super-rich.

[ablarc]

Actually, even some of the rich prefer vulgar display:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miabch/03ia.jpg

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miabch/03j.jpg

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miabch/03k.jpg

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miabch/03l.jpg

Early Modernist villas –or are they Deco? Is there really a difference?

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miabch/03m.jpg

And isn’t the apartment block just polychrome Bauhaus?

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miabch/03n.jpg

* * *

The city of Miami Beach is built on a barrier island that separates the Atlantic Ocean from Biscayne Bay, a lagoon. Like Venice, it’s connected to the mainland by causeway. On the mainland lurks Miami, a separate municipality, every bit as interesting as Mestre.

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miabch/04.gif

North Beach in foreground, skyline of Miami across the Bay:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miabch/04a.jpg
Photo from SSP.

While Miami Beach is urban and full of street life, Miami sports the usual suburban districts and damaged Southern downtown. Like Atlanta, this features parking lots, blank walls, trafficways, aloof highrises and poor people changing buses. In addition, you will find a surprising amount of artificial topography and colorful highrises, some by Arquitectonica. These you can safely ogle from your car on Biscayne Boulevard—the alternative being to state your business to the gated parking’s security guard.

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miabch/04g.jpg

As in Atlanta, there is also a heavy-rail subway looking for riders. The barrel of pork in which it came could have been sent to New York, Boston or Philadelphia, where it would have been gratefully put to good use.

[ablarc]

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miabch/05.gif

On an artificial island in the lagoon, the Port of Miami astounds when large with ships:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miabch/05a.jpg

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miabch/05b.jpg

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miabch/05c.jpg

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miabch/05d.jpg

Miami itself is mostly as ugly, unwalkable and forgettable (even Little Havana) as any other Sunbelt city. It has some nice subcenters, such as Coral Gables and Coconut Grove; though charming, these remain suburban. Coconut Grove’s a pleasurable outdoor shopping mall with chain stores and a good-looking clientele, and Coral Gables is an admirable Twenties planned suburb with beautiful streets, very pretty houses and an ingratiating shopping district. Kansas City, Cleveland and Los Angeles (among others) have places based on the same impulse, and these are pretty nice too. Nice, but suburban.

* * *

Sometimes nifty architecture can be a catalyst for gentrification. This was certainly the case in South Beach, which went from poor relation of North Beach back to today's glorious little modern city.

[Derek2k3]

wow, great thorough post.

[ablarc]

Just what you were hoping for...


MIAMI BEACH GARAGES

Miami Beach is a pretty good little city: dense and walkable with continuous street walls.
Pretty much nobody uses public transportation, yet there are almost no parking lots. This is because in Miami Beach they really know how to do garages:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miami-beach-garages/01.JPG

Sometimes they make them look like other buildings in the area that are not garages, and sometimes they adopt different strategies, but always they have the sense to continue the eye-level streetscape with retail. Can you spot the garage?:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miami-beach-garages/02.JPG


Oh, there it is:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miami-beach-garages/03.JPG

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miami-beach-garages/04.JPG

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miami-beach-garages/05.JPG

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miami-beach-garages/06.JPG

Sometimes a different strategy comes into play. Here’s a row of shops at the base of a verdant mountainside:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miami-beach-garages/08.JPG

Wait a minute! There aren’t any mountains in Florida! What the…?!

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miami-beach-garages/09.JPG

Well, I’ll be…! It’s a parking deck disguised as a mountain!

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miami-beach-garages/10.JPG

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miami-beach-garages/11.JPG

[ablarc]

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miami-beach-garages/12.JPG

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miami-beach-garages/13.JPG

Here’s how it looks at street level:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miami-beach-garages/14.JPG

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miami-beach-garages/15.JPG

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miami-beach-garages/16.JPG

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miami-beach-garages/17.JPG

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miami-beach-garages/18.JPG

Around the corner, where the entrance lurks:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miami-beach-garages/19.JPG

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miami-beach-garages/20.JPG

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miami-beach-garages/21.JPG

[ablarc]

The view from inside the garage:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miami-beach-garages/22.JPG

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miami-beach-garages/23.JPG

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miami-beach-garages/24.JPG

By code, garages must have perimeters that are 50% open to avoid expensive mechanical ventilation. Fortunately, the code official does not regard greenery as an obstruction. Plants in Florida do not lose their leaves; this solution would not work in most U.S. climates.

Here’s a newer garage with the plants just getting started. You can imagine how this will look in a year or two:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miami-beach-garages/25.JPG

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miami-beach-garages/26.JPG

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miami-beach-garages/27.JPG

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miami-beach-garages/28.JPG

[ablarc]

Parking in Miami Beach is a municipal utility; the city charges the same in these garages as at the ubiquitous curbside parking meters (25 cents for 15 minutes). You use one of the garages if you can’t find a space on the street or if you want to park for more than the curbside limit of two hours. Only three parking lots survive, charging a higher and uncompetitive rate (subject to negotiation) for the convenience of not having to drive inside a gloomy garage. These will soon disappear; and when they are redeveloped, the city will again be complete and restored. Until that happy moment, they provide the same wretched dosage of urban blight that is yielded by all parking lots:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miami-beach-garages/30.JPG

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miami-beach-garages/31.JPG

Even in Miami Beach it took a while to catch on to how to do a proper garage. Here is an older example that tries valiantly with its architecture while failing urbanistically. This example is hamstrung by its suburban ideology: note the preposterous little front lawn and of course the single-use zoning. No ground floor shops here:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miami-beach-garages/32.JPG

Even further back, they were naïve enough to think you can screen a garage with trees. Touching optimism:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miami-beach-garages/33.JPG

And the final aberration of old-timey modernism—parking garage as sculptural form:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/miami-beach-garages/34.JPG

[212]

Thanks again, ablarc.

I won't miss them when they're gone, but even those surface parking lots north of Lincoln Road are above average.

I've parked there at least half a dozen times. The lots offer some architectural voyeurism, the utilitarian backs of Deco and Moderne buildings on Lincoln Road; when they were built, they must have been on an alley and weren't so visible. Those facades can't be a tourist draw, but to me their unadorned tropical decay only adds to the overall composition.

And the workers in the parking booths are friendly.

Miami Beach is like NYC in that even the bad stuff is almost good.
The urban fabric is strong enough that a big tear in it becomes interesting in its own right.

[pianoman11686]

Another incredible compilation, ablarc. Thank you.

Over the past week, I spent a lot of time in Manhattan with a friend who was a first-time visitor. We saw a very good chunk of the city, including areas that I hardly had a reason to venture into - the East Village, SoHo, Greenwich Village, Chinatown, and Morningside Heights, just to name a few. I think I'm starting to realize the importance of urban fabric, as we refer to it - and it really isn't necessarily tied to highrise density. It's also increasingly rare, and it's good to see that the last bastions are doing as well as they are.

So, how long before you do another photo essay of one of New York's urban delights?

[Punzie]

Wow! What an amazing photo essay!

The villas and Spanish mansions are charming. So are the lines of palm trees. I could do without buildings painted in pastels, especially pink and peach. Is it just me?

Fabrizio said he'd be interested in seeing old photos of the same area. I took some in the 1970s. But they're not too good. Maybe somebody with more foresight than I has a collection of nice ones.:)

[Merry]

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious! Thank you, Ablarc, for that stupendous Art Deco expo.

[ablarc]

...old photos of the same area. I took some in the 1970s.
A bit dicey in those days?

[Punzie]

I wasn't, my camera was.:D

http://members.tripod.com/lisacafe/images/polaroid.jpg

[ablarc]

^ What about The Beach?

[Punzie]

It was not exactly my number one choice of vacation spot, but it was where my elderly relatives lived. As soon as the riots broke out and the Cuban boat people arrived, my relatives relocated to a retirement community in Deerfield Beach.

I haven't been to South Beach since the 1970s. That's why I'm especially fascinated when I see present-day photos of the area.

[BryanSereny]

It was not exactly my number one choice of vacation spot, but it was where my elderly relatives lived. As soon as the riots broke out and the Cuban boat people arrived, my relatives relocated to a retirement community in Deerfield Beach.

I haven't been to South Beach since the 1970s. That's why I'm especially fascinated when I see present-day photos of the area.

South Beach looks totaly different, I'm sure. As I'm sure you know, this photo essay skipped past the new skyscrapers that have been built in the past 10 years. They too contribute to the beauty of the island. ;)

[ablarc]

I think I'm starting to realize the importance of urban fabric, as we refer to it - and it really isn't necessarily tied to highrise density. It's also increasingly rare, and it's good to see that the last bastions are doing as well as they are.
After years of decline, urban fabric is actually making a comeback. As parking lots are replaced by buildings, urban mass is actually increasing nationally. Have you seen how nicely Washington, DC has bounced back after decades of decay? Even Philadelphia is healing. Surprisingly, Chicago has extensive bald patches used for on-grade parking; you'd expect land there to be worth more.

Small North American cities are hardest hit; most have dissolved altogether to the point where you can't talk about urban fabric. Exceptions are Charleston, Savannah, Annapolis, Quebec, Hoboken and Miami Beach. How is Santa Fe these days?

[Bob]

Nothing beats some good deco-ration. It rules.

[hey19932]

Great pics ablarc! When did this visit take place?

[BryanSereny]

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/182/378005826_f371d326a4_b.jpg

[homeandaway]

Miami is very hectic, and lively, thats the only reason why people go there, yet its skyline glitters at night which is lovely as it is shown in the prevuios post^^
~Alex~

[fishermb]

Miami is very hectic, and lively, thats the only reason why people go there, yet its skyline glitters at night which is lovely as it is shown in the prevuios post^^
~Alex~

You're forgetting a little something called the weather my friend. I was born and raised in Miami. Having just moved to NY from there, I'm constantly finding myself jealous of my father who golfs in the middle of Februaryand March.

[BryanSereny]

You're forgetting a little something called the weather my friend. I was born and raised in Miami. Having just moved to NY from there, I'm constantly finding myself jealous of my father who golfs in the middle of Februaryand March.

I'm from CT, and now living in Miami am constantly making my relatives and friends jealous! Weather has a direct impact on our day-to-day lives! :rolleyes:

[Zephyr]

Four months later, and this is still a thread that you like to get into and review again - a travelogue of sorts.

Miami/Miami Beach and Charleston, S.C. are two places that I particular enjoy visiting, although they are considerably different from one another. The color is what fascinates me about both. Miami's interesting vistas as the sun seems to peek around the corners and brightly glows onto the best of the buildings, with the warm breezes rustling the palms. Charleston for its history and tropical flourishes in a contained area, and thoughts about what it must have been like during the height of the war between the states.

[Ebryan]

ablarc, what a fantastic, informative photoessay. You really hit the nail on this one!

The Lincoln Rd Mall has always intrigued me--perhaps because it is slightly off the radar of the more touristy areas of South Beach. I cannot think of any other single location that feels completely uprooted from Southern Europe and plopped right down in North America. Truly a planning masterpiece.

[MidtownGuy]

Yeah I love the ambiance of Lincoln Road, too bad the name includes the word "mall" it is so NOT like an American "mall."

[MidtownGuy]

Hey ablarc,:) today a friend from Italy was visiting and I tried to describe South Beach after he had an unimpressive visit to Virginia Beach over the holiday weekend. His description of drive-thru fast food stretching for miles was pretty horrifying.
South Beach, I assured him, was a totally different thing. All I had to do was show him this magnificent thread of yours and he was anxious to book a flight.
Hmmm, I gotta get down there again too, it's been a while.
Thanks again for posting so many great photos ;)

[ablarc]

Europeans are often misled by Americans into thinking places like Virginia Beach are interesting. Most Europeans, however, like places that New Yorkers like. These places are urban and urbane. Miami Beach fills the bill and Virginia Beach does not.

[Luca]

Having visited both, I concur.

Indeed, outside of South Beach, most of Miami, IMHO, is of very, very marginal interest.