Collins Avenue stretches ahead of you, the long straight artery that runs the length of Miami Beach and traces the full arc of its resort history. John Collins, a New Jersey farmer who came to Miami Beach in 1907 to grow avocados, built a wooden bridge across the bay and began developing the land that would eventually bear his name. Collins Avenue connects every era of the beach: the low Art Deco hotels of South Beach, the grand Mid-Century resorts of the middle section, and the condo towers of the north end.
The blocks around you contain some of the finest examples of what architectural historians call Miami Modern — or MiMo — the style that defined Miami Beach's postwar resort boom. Where the Art Deco architects of the 1930s were working in a streamlined, horizontal aesthetic, the MiMo architects of the 1940s and 1950s reached upward: soaring fins and eyebrows, dramatic vertical signage, structures designed to be read at sixty miles per hour from a convertible. These buildings belong to an optimistic mid-century America that believed the future would be beautiful and that vacations were a form of moral uplift.
The optimism is affecting, even now.