World War II, Miami Beach was introduced to middle America by an unlikely promoter—the U.S. military, which commandeered more than three hundred of its hotels and apartment houses as quarters for Army Air Corps cadets. Thousands of young men (a full one-fifth of all who trained with the Army Air Corps) dropped their duffel bags in Miami Beach. Compared to pitching a tent somewhere in New Mexico, bunking in an oceanfront hotel must have been positively delightful. At war's end, many veterans, recalling their time in Miami Beach with fondness, boarded trains or planes with their families and headed back.
Tourists continued to swell Miami Beach's wintertime population, but by the 1950s their approach was less laid back. Now they came for much more than relaxation in the sun. They ate steaks and ribs at the Embers or up at Parham's, near Surfside. They dined regally at Gatti's on the bay side and lined up for hours for a meal at Joe's Stone Crab. They partied into the late hours, if not in the glitzy new hotels, then in the resort motels farther up the strip, where bawdy comics and brassy instrumentalists offered nighttime relief to sunburned parents who had finally gotten their kids off to bed.
Miami Beach lured visitors by perfecting the art of the "Come on down," first through a steady stream of oceanside cheesecake photos transmitted to the nation's mostly male newspaper photo editors, then through hugely popular radio and television programs. These included Arthur Godfrey Time, which began in the early 1950s, and occasional visits by The Ed Sullivan Show—one of them featuring the blockbuster first U.S. appearance of the Beatles in 1964. The long-running Jackie Gleason Show, which began broadcasting that year, warmed Miami Beach Chamber of Commerce hearts each week with its boastful opening, "From Miami Beach, the fun and sun capital of America."
A period of decay that began in the 1970s is nearly forgotten now, and the strip is again riding the waves of popularity. Today, Miami Beach is an upscale residential community with classic hotels and gourmet restaurants. Celebrities from many fields own homes here again, including Oprah Winfrey and singer Gloria Estefan. The Hollywood stars are back, as well, this time flocking to South Beach, along with supermodels, photographers, and fashion designers, echoing the glamour and excitement of glory days gone by.
The Hotel Astor lobby has been restored to the height of Ail: Deco splendor. Today, chef Johnny Vinczencz lures a chic clientele with his "new American barbecue" cuisine at Astor Place, situated within the hotel.
Renovation and Rebirth on South Beach
Art Deco gets a facelift
by Howard Kleinberg
By night, Miami Beach's Art Deco district's trendy restaurants and glittering night spots attract the famous and the curious. By day, fashion photographers set up their cameras on the streets and angular models preen and pose. Photos of its sleek buildings adorn the covers of travel and fashion magazines worldwide, and the rich and famous from all over the world have made it one of their favorite gathering spots.
Yet not very long ago, South Beach, or SoBe—the section of Miami Beach south of 20th Street—was derelict: a collection of empty storefronts and small, frayed hotels where retirees sat on porches gazing out at Ocean Drive. It was seen as a district to be razed rather than raised. But no more.
The unrelenting passion of a group of preservation-minded fashion designers and the gamble of a few ambitious investors have succeeded in resurrecting South Beach and have helped to restore to Miami Beach some of the old glory it enjoyed during its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s.
Today's beautifully restored pastel-colored hotels had their origins as chalky white buildings designed by architects in the 1930s in styles variously labeled Zig Zag, Streamline, and Depression Moderne. The architects were working in the idiom of classic Art Deco, a school of design that combined the flowery forms of Art Nouveau and Egyptian motifs with the geometric patterns of Cubism to create a form that embodied the ideals of the New Machine Age.
Classical Art Deco took a sharp detour in Miami, however, when architects decided to incorporate whimsical tropical motifs into their designs: the concrete "eyebrows" that shade the windows of the Hotel Astor from the sun, the porthole-shaped windows of The Tides, the seahorse and tropical fish bas-relief that graces the facade of the Marlin, the octagonal concrete medallions that band the top of the Delano's sweeping entryway and repeated in its pastel terrazzo floor.
In the late 1960s, the term "Art Deco" came to encompass the vintage buildings of Ocean Drive, and in 1979, they became the first twentieth-century structures to be included in the National Register of Historic Places. Today, scant blocks away, lofty condominiums hover above the low-lying, restored structures of the Depression years.
This remarkable resurrection has drawn increasing numbers of rich and famous visitors from Europe, South America and the rest of the United States, including Hollywood, European, and Latin American stars, as well as the cream of the crop from the realm of international fashion. Once again, Miami Beach has arrived.
South Beach, by Alexander Chen.
Cubans in Miami
At the forefront of a culinary revolution
by Maricel Presilla
They came by sea and by air in battered chartered planes and makeshift rafts and transformed Miami into a vibrant city with deep Latin roots. For Cubans are like the sturdy tubers at the core of their cuisine; they stay firmly in the ground and don't easily dissolve into their surroundings.
The first major wave of Cuban immigrants settled in the declining downtown area between Flagler and Eighth Streets, now known as Little Havana, in the early 1960s. Gradually they moved north to Hialeah, west and south of Coral Gables, Key Biscayne, and other affluent areas, and, most recently, east of revitalized Miami Beach.
South Florida's links to Cuba, however, go back as far as 1868, when immigrants and exiles transformed sleepy Key West into a prosperous Cuban enclave complete with cigar factories, social clubs, newspapers, restaurants, coffee shops, and schools. Key West also became a lively point of commercial exchange between Cuba and the United States. By the 1920s, entrepreneur Charles Brooks was shipping Cuban citrus fruits and avocados by boat to Key West and by train to points north. When a fierce hurricane destroyed the railway in 1935, Brooks planted citrus and avocados farther north, in Homestead, where his grandson, J. R., later founded Brooks Tropicals, Florida's largest shipper of tropical produce.
El Palacio de los Jugos (Palace of the Juice) is where Cuban Miami comes to shop for food.
A quarter of a century later, Cuban immigrants planted fields of tropical root vegetables—starchy yuca, sweet boniato, and shaggy malanga—as well as plantains and tropical fruits, alongside the old groves in Homestead. The magnificent mamey sapote groves were protected by barbed wire and watch-dogs, as if the leathery brown skin and sweet, salmon-colored flesh of the fruit enclosed gold nuggets instead of shiny black seeds.
Homero Capote, a farmer from central Cuba, is emblematic of the resilient wave of immigrants whose knowledge and toil fueled a culinary revolution that sustains Latin American cuisines in this country and provides the raw materials for some of our best Florida chefs. Capote began as a field worker but soon rented land of his own and experimented with the corn seeds and malanga corms his father sent. Over the years, Capote built up a thriving business of tropical tubers nurtured by hard work and commitment to his adopted land.
During the 1960s, Miami's once lonely and quiet downtown, its manicured sameness, also changed. The streets became crowded with small bodegas (grocery stores) and storefront Cuban restaurants serving fragrant black beans, hearty roast pork, and tender yuca doused in
mojo, a tart, garlicky sauce of citrus juice and oil. Juice stands sold batidos (shakes made with dozens of exotic tropical fruits), and Cuban bakeries turned out guava pastries and elaborately decorated cakes for the lavish fiestas