Official Art Deco Walking Tour — Miami Design Preservation League, Miami Beach, daily at 10.30 am
Photo: Gzzz, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons The Miami Design Preservation League runs its Official Art Deco Walking Tour every day at 10.30 in the morning, rain or shine. It leaves from the Art Deco Welcome Center at 1001 Ocean Drive and takes about two hours over roughly a mile and a half of the Miami Beach Architectural Historic District.
The route reads three styles side by side: the curves and pastel fronts of Art Deco, the arched loggias and terracotta roofs of Mediterranean Revival, and the later Miami Modern. It is not only a walk along the pavement. The League’s guides take the group inside, into hotel lobbies, restaurants and commercial spaces, which is where most of the terrazzo floors, the reliefs and the original fittings of the 1930s are still to be found.
The people who lead the tour belong to the organisation that kept the district standing. The League dates its beginning to 1976, when Barbara Baer Capitman and her son John set out to mark the American bicentennial; with the designer Leonard Horowitz she identified a concentration of 1930s buildings in South Beach that, in the League’s words, “the world had largely written off”. In 1979 the Miami Beach Architectural Historic District was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, which the League records as the first urban twentieth-century historic district in the country to be listed. Listing did not stop demolitions: the League lost the New Yorker Hotel and went on contesting orders one at a time, and counts the expansion of the full Art Deco District in 1992 among the fights it won. Capitman died in 1990.
The Welcome Center, where the tour starts, is in the 10th Street Auditorium of 1954 and also houses the Art Deco Museum, with scale models and changing exhibitions on the three styles.
Groups are of up to twenty people and headsets are provided. Tickets are $50 for adults aged 18 to 64, $40 for seniors of 65 and over, $35 for those aged 13 to 17, and free for children of 12 and under; admission to the Art Deco Gift Shop is included. The League is closed, and no tour runs, on Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and New Year’s Day.
Booking is on the organiser’s page linked below.
📷 Become a Cultural Heritage Online photographer
Share your photos of events: they stay published under your name as the author. The more they're seen, the more you get noticed — and soon a contest will reward the most appreciated photos.
Log in or sign up free to add a photo