Miami Beach Hotel Row from Biscayne Bay, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Miami Beach Hotel Row from Biscayne Bay, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Miami Beach Hotel Row from Biscayne Bay, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-0A3233

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Someone took a boat out into Biscayne Bay in the 1950s to photograph Miami Beach the way it wanted to be seen: a wall of white Art Deco and Streamline Moderne hotels rising behind a fringe of palms, the whole ensemble announcing that Florida had figured out what Americans wanted and built twelve versions of it in a row. The central tower with its spire belonged to a skyline that civic boosters were still assembling, adding hotels the way a card player adds chips when the game is going well. A cargo vessel sits at a working pier in the foreground, the part of the waterfront that the hotel brochures cropped out. Miami Beach in this decade was operating on the confident assumption that the formula — white concrete, ocean access, Northeastern tourists — was permanent, and had not yet met the developers who would eventually decide the formula needed forty more stories.

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