Here at the Miami Design Preservation League's Welcome Center, you have reached the nerve center of the movement that saved South Beach from the wrecking ball. In the late 1970s, preservationist Barbara Baer Capitman looked at these crumbling pastel buildings and saw a national treasure where developers saw vacant lots. She fought city hall, developers, and public indifference to win National Register designation for the Miami Beach Architectural District in 1979.
The district runs roughly from 5th to 17th Street between Lenox and the ocean — about one square mile containing more than eight hundred contributing structures. The dominant style is Tropical Art Deco: the geometric ornament and streamlined curves of the Deco movement modified for a beach climate, with wide overhangs to block sun, terrazzo floors for cool feet, and colors chosen to glow against the Atlantic light. Without Capitman and her colleagues, almost none of this would exist.
Her campaign helped ignite the global historic preservation movement and made South Beach the international destination it became in the 1990s.