WATER & COAST
South Beach
Miami-Dade County · South Florida & the Keys
The southern end of the barrier island of Miami Beach, between the Atlantic and Biscayne Bay.
ABOUT THIS PLACE
The Lum brothers bought a hundred and sixty-five acres of it in 1870 meaning to grow coconuts, which failed. John Collins began a bridge from the mainland in 1913 and Carl Fisher put up the money to finish it that year, and the three of them, Collins, Lummus and Fisher, brought the town into being; it was incorporated on March 26, 1915. The 1920s filled it with money and the 1930s gave it the architecture, the largest collection of Streamline Moderne and Art Deco buildings anywhere. By the 1970s it had become a run-down retirement district and the buildings were close to being lost, until Barbara Baer Capitman's campaign got the district designated in 1979. The revival from the late 1980s turned it into a center of fashion, nightlife and design. Ocean Drive runs along Lummus Park and the beach, and the whole place is walkable, which in this county is unusual
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