Showing 1-12 of 12 results
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Art Deco Welcome Center
To be honest, this 'welcome center' is a tatty gift shop. But it's located in the old beach patrol headquarters, one of the best deco buildings out there, and you can book some excellent around US$20 guided walking tours, which are some of the best introductions to the layout and history of South Beach on offer.
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Bacardi Building
You don't need to down 151 to appreciate the striking Miami headquarters of the world's largest family-owned spirits company. The main event is a beautifully decorated tower that looks like the mosaic pattern of a tropical bathhouse on steroids; inside is a small art gallery and museum dedicated to the famously anti-Castro Bacardis (think about what 'Cuba Libre' actually means the next time you order one).
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Biltmore Hotel
In the most opulent neighborhood of one of the showiest cities in the world, the Biltmore peers down her nose and says, 'Hrmph.' It's one of the greatest of the grand hotels of the American Jazz Age, if this joint was a fictional character from a novel, it'd be, without question, Jay Gatsby. The history of this landmark reads like an Agatha Christie novel on speed. Al Capone had a speakeasy here, and the Capone Suite is still haunted by the spirit of Fats Walsh, murdered here.
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Brickell Ave Bridge
Miami Vice wasn't all exaggeration; drug-runners zipped under this bridge in power boats during a high speed chase with DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) agents on the day it reopened. The bridge crosses the Miami River, and cars pass under a 17ft bronze statue of a Tequesta warrior and his family, which sits perched atop the Pillar of History, a column that details the pre-European history of South Florida.
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Dade County Courthouse
If you end up on trial here, at least you'll get a free tour of one of the most imposing courthouses in America. When Miami outgrew its first courthouse, it moved legal proceedings to this neoclassical icon, built between 1925 and 1929 for around US$4 million. It's a very…appropriate building; if structures were people, the courthouse would definitely be a judge. Some useless trivia: back in the day, the top nine floors served as a 'secure' prison, from which more than 70 prisoners escaped.
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Española Way
In the evening, stroll down Española Way , a trés European strip lined with restaurants and cafés representing most of the romance-language-speaking countries.
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Fontainebleau Hilton Hotel & Resort
How over the top is the Fontainbleau? Well, when Brian De Palma needed a place to sign off Scarface , he decided this would be a good place for Al Pacino to snort a mountain of coke and slaughter an army of Colombians. Ya gotta be grand to warrant that kind of cinematography, and this iconic 1954 leviathan, another brainchild of Lapidus, is certainly that.
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Freedom Tower
The 'Ellis Island of the South' served as an immigration processing center for almost half a million Cuban refugees in the 1960s. Placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979, it was also home to the Miami Daily News for 32 years. The top facade is one of two surviving area towers modeled after the Giralda bell tower in Spain's Cathedral of Seville - the second is at the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables.
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La Plaza De La Cubanidad
This fountain and monument is a tribute both to the Cuban provinces and the people drowned by Castro's forces while trying to escape from Cuba in 1994 on a ship, ' 13 de Mayo ,' which was sunk just off the coast.
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Liberty City
Liberty City, northwest of Downtown, is a misnomer. Made infamous by the Liberty City Riots in 1980, the area is poor and crime is higher than in other parts of the city. And, while plans exist to renovate the area by creating a village of cultural and tourist attractions, the prospects of that happening in the near future look doubtful.
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Miami Beach Post Office
If you're going to send the family some corny postcards (of which there is no shortage), do so from this 1937 deco gem, the first South Beach renovation project tackled by preservationists in the '70s. This Depression moderne building in the 'stripped classic' style was constructed thanks to President Franklin D Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration (WPA), which supported unemployed artists during the Great Depression.
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Old Us Post Office
Constructed in 1912, this post office and county courthouse served as the first federal building in Miami. The building, with its elaborate doors and carved entryways, was purchased in 1937 to serve as the country's first savings and loan (and ergo, the core of the industry that would fund Miami's skyline). Government prosecutors moved into the adjacent Federal Courthouse and Federal Justice Building.
Showing 1-12 of 12 results
