Miami Beach: Urban Solutions 02: — EATING FLORIDA

 In many ways, Miami Beach is the creation of one man, Carl G. Fisher, a partially blind, high school drop-out. Fisher became a successful manufacturer of compressed acetylene headlights used by the first cars, which then evolved into the first automotive headlights. After selling that firm to Union Carbide for nine million dollars, Fisher morphed into a land developer in Indianapolis who built the Indianapolis Speedway. Before he arrived in southern Florida, Miami Beach consisted of a 200-foot wide continuous strip of barrier island-sand bar that paralleled the coast. It was occupied largely by tidal mangroves, plagues of mosquitoes and those always nasty sandflies. Only a few feet above sea level, the island sloped gently east and west away from a line of fragile sand dunes. Not many years before Fisher showed up, an 81-year-old Quaker farmer, John S. Collins, had established an avocado plantation on the slightly higher northern end of the island and was chiefly interested in furthering his silvacultural pursuits. But Collins family members had other ideas about developing the island, primarily as prime oceanfront property but ran short of the needed capital. And thus Carl Fisher became involved.

Recognizing that opportunity as the gold mine it was, Fisher immediately bought more land from two local bankers, the Lummus brothers, and began dredging what ended up as three million cubic yards of sand and mud from the bottom of Biscayne Bay. It should come as no surprise that that action totally destroyed that part of the Bay as a natural biological community, perhaps for the remaining period of human occupance on Earth. The spoil was piled on the sand bar to create a “real” island. As an aside, Fisher paid absolutely nothing for the fill materials dredged from Biscayne Bay. Not one thin dime. His only costs were for labor and machinery, not materials. After the pumping was completed, Fisher got down to the real work. In 1921 alone, Carl and his associates sold over $23 million in lots lining the recently poured streets and sidewalks of the newly named “Miami Beach.”

Say what you want about his appalling lack of environmental concern, Fisher was a modern Spanish conquistador, driven by his own vision of gold, Florida land speculation gold he hoped would start filling his pockets and never stop. The Miami Beach we see today, with all its marvels and foibles, is a testament to his single-minded determination to succeed no matter what havoc he wreaked on the environment. But we’ve come to praise Carl, not to bury him with hindsight. Or at least to praise what he wrought, if only indirectly.

Carl Fisher wanted Lincoln Road to be the Miami Beach counterpart to Fifth Avenue in New York, serving as the link connecting development on Biscayne Bay with that fronting the Atlantic Ocean. Although in the South Florida boom times it came close to matching any number of upscale shopping districts in major U.S. cities, that bubble eventually popped and the area fell into a slow decline.

Today, Lincoln Road is a pedestrian mall between Alton Road and Washington Avenue. It is thriving as a shopping and dining destination for locals and tourists alike. Restaurants offer indoor or outdoor seating or both. If you pay attention you’ll hear a cornucopia of languages, including the ubiquitous Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, French, German, Yiddish, Russian, Polish, Arabic and many that you may have trouble identifying. Street people of all varieties wander up and down the Mall: tourists from Iowa gawking, well dressed straights, strikingly attired gays and trans-gendereds, mothers with children, bicyclers, roller bladers, skateboarders, muscle-heads in wifebeaters, even jugglers and magicians to spice things up. It’s diversity up the ying-yang.

If you Road Trip to Miami Beach the first thing that should catch your eye is the marvelous Art Deco design. Art Deco as a style of painting, architecture, industrial and interior design was widely influenced by a combination of modern and ancient art. It started with Art Nouveau and the Art and Crafts movement and rapidly evolved with inputs from Cubism, Italian Futurism, and Constructivism. However, it also freely borrowed themes first expressed in the highly standardized design styles of several ancient cultures, particularly Assyrian, Egyptian and Persian. Art Deco designers used stepped forms, rounded corners, multiple-striped decorative elements and black decoration characteristic of those cultures. The critical elements were frequently aligned in geometrical order and expressed in a simple format stripped of excess ornamentation and typically relied on modern age, machine-like materials.

The style we define today as Art Deco had two principal sources. The first was a synthesis of numerous exotic and dynamic cultural influences that became popular in the first two decades of the 20th Century, culminating in Paris, that eternal hotbed of artistic accomplishment. Some art historians believe the nick-name, Art Deco, arose as a semi-official abbreviation of the 1925 Paris Design Fair, the “Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes.” Others correctly point out that the Societe des Artistes Decorateurs was formed back in 1901 in Paris with the goals of merging industrial mass production with the decorative arts. And still others claim the name was first used in 1966 during a retrospective of the 1925 Paris show. Whatever the origin of the name, in the early 1920s the movement was essentially taken over and championed by Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe. His stunning set designs, borrowing heavily from African and Oriental art and characterized by visually sensuous patterns and materials, became the rage of avant-garde theater-goers throughout Europe and popularized the movement among upper-crust trend setters.

That exotic development in Paris merged with the more technical influences of the Italian Futurists and such leading Cubist artists as Dali and Cocteau. It also borrowed extensively from Egyptian funerary artifacts (especially inspired by the discovery of munificent riches in Tut-ankh-amun’s tomb by Howard Carter in 1922 that so excited international society) as well as the art of the Mayans, Aztecs, Moors, and Assyrians. Early Art Deco also luxuriated in the application of rare and expensive materials and capitalized on the fluidity of nature by using fountains, curves, seashells, and rare and mythic animals as central motifs and themes.

The second great source of Art Deco inspiration was its assimilation into modern American culture of the late 1920s and 1930s. Among the major artistic and architectural influences were the Chicago Century of Progress (1933) and the New York World’s Fair (1939). Of special significance was the movement’s adoption into the American mass production mainstream of industrial design. Household appliances, cars, women’s fashion accessories, fine jewelry, furniture, hotels, apartments, even factories were designed in the Art Deco style, which incidentally is also known to building-type specialists as Art or Style Moderne. By the mid-thirties, Art Deco had literally exploded on the international artistic scene as a major force. In New York City alone the famous Radio City Music Hall, the Chrysler Building, and the Waldorf Astoria are striking examples of Art Deco design.

The tropical Art Deco architecture of Miami Beach proudly shouted its rejection of all that was staid and conventional with its racing stripes, rounded corners, raised eyebrows (otherwise known to us cultural low-lifes as canopies) over porthole windows and glass block walls. Constructed largely during the mid- to late-1930s, the colorful Art Deco structures brought to full flower a design style that was visually stimulating, exuberant, daringly seductive, sensual, theatrical, original and alive with an irrepressibly vibrant dynamism. The rich combinations of curved surfaces juxtaposed with flat walls, luxurious ornamentation, steel railings, curvilinear windows, flat roofs, and pastel colors dazzle the eye and excite the imagination. Although each Art Deco building exhibits considerable individuality, the power of the striking architectural theme results in a remarkable visual unity throughout the South Beach area and much of the rest of Miami Beach.

But architectural styles inevitably fall out of fashion and are no longer at the cutting edge of style. Or even interesting. Shortly after World War II the South Beach area settled into twenty years of genteel neglect. Salvation arrived in the mid-1970s when Barbara Capitman and Leonard Horowitz visited and discovered a forgotten treasure trove, hundreds of visually exciting but aging Art Deco buildings. Capitman and Horowitz were so enthused by the idea of saving the wonderful architecture they helped found the Miami Design Preservation League in 1976 with the express purpose of reversing the downward trend and immediately halting the demolition of buildings in varying stages of deterioration.

In 1979, after well more than a decade of neglect followed by a decade of rampant decline, one square mile of Miami Beach was listed an “Historic District” in the National Register of Historic Places. Suddenly, restoration was in the air as developers realized they could earn substantial tax credits for bringing buildings designated as historic back to life. The District is officially located between 5th Street on the south, 23rd Street on the north, Ocean Drive on the east and Lenox Court on the south. It contains more than 650 buildings in the distinctive Mediterranean Revival and Art Deco styles. Although many additional examples of these designs types can be found in other sections of Miami Beach and in the Greater Miami Metropolitan Area, the District contains more buildings in the Art Deco style, nearly 500, than any other single area in the country. And many of those structures are truly outstanding and are among the finest examples of that design type existing today.

But all is not perfect in that sub-tropical paradise. Crime and poverty are not unknown. And a substantial number of the lovely old structures face a harsh reality, one that may have no viable upside. City of Miami Beach building officials say the reality is that many of the old Art Deco buildings, as historically significant as they are, may not survive the ravages of time and shoddy construction. No matter how much money and effort are expended, whether by private owners or developers. The heart of the problem for some of the structures is neither age nor a lack of maintenance that inevitably leads to deterioration but with the original building materials. Which all too often included beach sand and sea water. The simple fact is that not long after the internal reinforcement rods come in contact with salt they begin to erode. It’s only a matter of time until the surrounding concrete starts deteriorating and eventually crumbles.

Little can be done about saving original structures that are infected with those problems. The truth that many preservationists don’t want to acknowledge is renovation and restoration can be a bitch because you never know what’s behind a wall or the ceiling until you rip it out. And either find rot and decay or an usable whatever it is you’re looking at. My heart is squarely on the side of preservation but when it’s your money at risk renovation decisions become far more complex.

Exacerbating that already difficult situation is old-fashioned human greed. Many developers would rather see their Art Deco buildings crumble and then rebuild with modern structures containing three or four times more floors. Thus, making considerably more money. Although some developers have offered to rebuild replicas of the hotels that are facing the wrecking ball it’s not certain whether that alternative would be acceptable to historic preservation board members.

One reason historic preservationists are upset is because they believe that the City’s Building Department itself is adding to the problem by being too quick to condemn deteriorated structures. And they have accused developers of adopting a policy of deliberate neglect. Because it’s so much less expensive to knock the buildings down and replace them with larger structures than it is to restore them. Again, it’s a complex situation with no easy answers.

Now for a change of pace. After a long day trudging around South Beach’s Ocean Drive and Collins Avenue you might get tired of the preening, beautiful people. And the milling hordes of middle-class strainers and strivers desperate to spot those preening, beautiful people. And making themselves as obnoxious as humanly possible by intruding in ways that would embarrass a stone. The solution is to take a Road Trip to North Beach, SoBe’s prole relative. It doesn’t have a single high-fashion model draped around a light pole. Or photographers dashing up and down the streets eager to snap a photo to sell to the grocery store rags. And yes, North Beach is decidedly unhip and even on the wrong side of grungy. Ain’t no doubt about it. Commercial uses that have seen better days are everywhere. North Beach is the type of urban place where the Walgreens is an anchor store. Only it’s anchoring a gaggle of inexpensive ethnic restaurants — Italian, Argentinean, Cuban, Peruvian. And a kosher deli or three, of course.

However gritty North Beach’s urban ambiance, it’s refreshingly real when compared to the more touristy part of South Beach on Ocean Drive. It’s a lot like the old urban neighborhoods I was familiar with as a kid. So, I find that it fits like a comfortable old shoe. Not especially attractive but somehow reassuring and appealing on a gut level. It delivers more substance than the other-worldly South Beach, with its nose stuck high in the air, so desperate it is to attract beautiful people, the moneyed crowd, and assorted phonies. You’ve got to remember, as an urban planner I get paid to turn places like North Beach around. So I find communities like that, with workable urban fabric and with a lot more opportunities than constraints, to be absolutely irresistible, at least on a professional basis. But certain parts of North Beach are definitely on the edge. So, don’t walk around with your head up your ass, to coin a phrase. Vigilance should be a way of life, especially for women. No matter where you are or what time of day it is.

Implications

The thing is, despite beginning as an unmitigated environmental disaster, Miami Beach succeeds in doubled spades as an urban place where its neighbor Coral Gables makes an only slightly better than passing grade. Despite the oh-so-tony Miracle Mile and nearby and adjacent blocks of higher density development, Coral Gables is mostly a low-density suburb. Yes, a teeth-rattlingly attractive suburb but a suburb nonetheless.

Miami Beach, especially South Beach, features much higher densities, many more mixed uses, and far greater socioeconomic diversity, making it an urban place of great excitement and vibrancy. And I’m not talking about a block or two but mile after mile. Make no mistake, Miami Beach is about celebrating life for a wide range of social and income groups largely because of its higher densities and greater variety of mixed uses. The State needs more Miami Beach-type solutions — meaning higher densities, mixed uses, increased connectivity, and diversity — to slow developers from eating land and water resources at prodigious rates. Period. Well, not necessarily Miami Beach with all its warts and baggage but you should get the message.

Incidentally, warts and baggage are what you get with real cities rather than faux creations like Disney’s Celebration. But more on that topic later.