History

Miami Beach in 1938 was completing the most sustained period of architectural production in its history. The decade between 1930 and 1940 had transformed what had been a barrier island of beach hotels and seasonal entertainment into a dense urban neighborhood of hotels, apartment buildings, and commercial structures, almost all built in the emerging styles of the decade: Art Deco, Streamline Moderne, and the Tropical Deco variant developed specifically for the Florida climate, which combined the geometric and aerodynamic vocabulary of the national styles with an openness to light, breeze, and color suited to the subtropical environment.

Henry Hohauser had arrived in Miami Beach from New York in 1932 and quickly became the dominant figure in the local architectural scene. Working with remarkable speed and consistent quality, he designed dozens of the district’s most significant hotels, apartment buildings, and commercial structures throughout the 1930s and into the 1940s. His work for the Essex House represented a mature expression of his Streamline Moderne approach: the horizontal banding that the style inherited from international modernism, combined with the nautical references — rounded corners, porthole windows, eyebrow sun shades — that gave South Beach its distinctive character.

The Miami Beach Architectural District was designated a National Register Historic District in 1979, the first twentieth-century district in the country to receive that recognition. The designation came after years of advocacy by the Miami Design Preservation League, founded in 1976 by Barbara Baer Capitman, which had fought the widespread demolition of the Deco buildings that was occurring as the neighborhood declined from its mid-century peak. The Essex House, as one of Hohauser’s major works, was central to the argument for the district’s historic significance.