Breakwater Hotel
Two white pylons rise above 940 Ocean Drive, their vertical fins cutting the sky like a ship’s bow-rails — the Breakwater Hotel’s 1939 silhouette is one of the most recognised symbols of South Beach’s Art Deco corridor.
At a glance
The Breakwater Hotel was completed in 1939 at 940 Ocean Drive, designed by architect Anton Skislewicz. Its most distinctive feature — a pair of tall, blade-like vertical fins projecting above the roofline — made it an instant landmark on a street of horizontal Streamline buildings. The name and the fins both evoke the maritime vocabulary that pervaded South Beach’s architectural imagination in the late 1930s: a decade when ocean liners, dirigibles, and streamlined trains set the aesthetic register for modern ambition.
Key facts
- Architect: Anton Skislewicz
- Completed: 1939
- Style: Art Deco / Streamline Moderne
- Address: 940 Ocean Drive, Miami Beach, FL 33139
- Heritage status: Contributing building, Miami Beach Architectural District (NRHP, 1979)
- Floors: 3
- Signature feature: Central vertical tower with BREAKWATER sign above the entrance
History
Ocean Drive in the 1930s was the city’s showcase waterfront, and every hotelier competed to differentiate their building’s silhouette in a street of similarly scaled, similarly budgeted properties. Skislewicz’s solution for the Breakwater was vertical emphasis — the two fin pylons acting both as signage armatures and as pure architectural gesture, drawing the eye upward in a composition otherwise dominated by horizontal banding.
The hotel, like its Ocean Drive neighbours, was pressed into military service during World War II as the U.S. Army Air Forces commandeered South Beach’s hotel stock for a vast training base. The postwar era brought gradual decline to the district as tourism patterns shifted and older buildings were neglected. By the 1970s Ocean Drive had become one of the most poverty-affected streets in South Florida.
The 1979 NRHP listing of the Miami Beach Architectural District — the first twentieth-century district ever protected under the National Register — gave legal weight to the preservationists’ efforts. Restoration of the Breakwater was part of the broader wave of investment that remade South Beach in the 1980s and 1990s, with the building’s fin towers cleaned, repainted, and illuminated at night, making them among the most-photographed vertical accents on the Drive.
What you see
The Breakwater’s façade is organised around a tripartite rhythm: a recessed central bay flanked by the two projecting fin towers. Each fin climbs from the roofline of the three-storey body to roughly double the building height, its face punctuated by a horizontal slot window and capped with the hotel name in relief lettering. Porthole windows — another maritime reference — punctuate the side elevations, admitting light without compromising the flat stucco surface that carries the colour scheme.
At street level, the entrance canopy projects over the pavement in a shallow arc, its underside carrying decorative reliefs in the low-relief geometric ornament typical of South Beach Deco. The current white-and-cobalt colour scheme, selected during the 1980s restoration, emphasises the formal contrasts between the horizontal base and the vertical accents in a way that reads clearly across Ocean Drive’s open prospect to the beach.
Practical information
- Visiting: Operating hotel; bar and terrace are accessible to day visitors
- Photography: The fins are most dramatic in the late afternoon when the western sun backlights them; at night, illumination makes them visible from the beach path
- Walking distance: 5 minutes on foot from the Art Deco Welcome Center at 1001 Ocean Drive
- Accessibility: Flat access from street level; Ocean Drive has wide pavement throughout
Getting there
Located at 940 Ocean Drive, four blocks from the Lummus Park beachfront. From Miami International Airport, take the MacArthur Causeway (approximately 20 minutes by car, longer during peak hours). The closest Metrobus route runs on Collins Avenue, one block west; the South Beach Local circulator bus provides frequent service along Washington and Alton. Street parking on Ocean Drive is metered; the 7th Street garage on Collins is the nearest structure.
Nearby
- Colony Hotel — Henry Hohauser’s 1935 neon-signed hotel, two blocks south
- Cardozo Hotel — Hohauser’s 1939 Streamline Moderne, four blocks north
- Miami Beach Architectural District — over 800 contributing Art Deco and Streamline Moderne structures
- Miami — South Beach and Tropical Art Déco — editorial overview of the district’s context
Photo gallery
Sources
- Miami Design Preservation League — mdpl.org (district history, building records)
- Capitman, Barbara Baer. Deco Delights: Preserving Art Deco Architecture. E.P. Dutton, 1988.
- Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), Miami Beach Architectural District, HABS FL-13-MIAM,5 — Library of Congress, loc.gov
- National Register of Historic Places, Miami Beach Architectural District, 1979 nomination form — nps.gov
- Smiley, David. Pedestrian Modern: Shopping and American Architecture, 1925–1956. University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
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