Millionaire's Row is what this stretch of Collins Avenue in Miami Beach's Mid-Beach area was historically called, and you are on it. While South Beach was developing its Art Deco vocabulary for the middle-class resort market, the stretch from about 23rd to 46th Street attracted the biggest money in American tourism: massive resort hotels built for a clientele that expected grand lobbies, multiple restaurants, ocean frontage, and entertainment rivaling Las Vegas. These hotels — the Eden Roc, the Seville, the DiLido, the Sans Souci — were designed in what their architect Morris Lapidus called 'too much is never enough': elaborate curving facades, dramatic cantilevered marquees, indoor waterfalls, and lobbies designed to make guests feel they had entered a different world.
The Rat Pack played these rooms. Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe honeymooned here. Television variety shows broadcast from these stages.
By the 1970s most of these hotels had declined into convention center venues or worse. The restoration and reinvention of Mid-Beach is an ongoing project, with several hotels converted to luxury condominiums and others renovated as boutique properties. The scale of these buildings — their sheer ambition — is still breathtaking.