History

The Miami Beach Art Deco building boom ran from approximately 1930 to 1942, producing nearly 800 buildings along Ocean Drive, Collins Avenue, and Washington Avenue in a compressed decade of investment, optimism, and architectural invention. Roy France was among the most prolific architects of this period, his commissions ranging from modest walk-up apartment buildings to the large-scale hotels that anchored Collins Avenue.

The National Hotel opened in 1940, the same year that Collins Avenue was consolidating its identity as a resort corridor distinct from the earlier, more crowded Ocean Drive. Its site — mid-block between 16th and 17th Streets — gave France room for a generous setback that created the hotel’s signature pool colonnade along the south side, an arrangement that both cooled the building and provided a theatrical backdrop for the pool terrace behind. Through the postwar decades the hotel declined along with the rest of the district, reaching near-dereliction by the 1970s.

Miami Beach’s Art Deco preservation movement, championed by architect Leonard Horowitz and activist Barbara Capitman in the late 1970s, secured National Register status for the district in 1979 — the first twentieth-century neighborhood to receive such recognition. The National Hotel was subsequently restored, reopening as one of the district’s flagship properties.