Notice Ocean Drive, arguably the most photographed street in America. The buildings flanking you — low-slung, pastel-painted, their facades decorated with racing stripes, porthole windows, and eyebrow sunshades — are the finest concentration of Art Deco architecture in the world. They went up between 1930 and 1942, designed largely by local architects like Henry Hohauser and Albert Anis for a clientele of Jewish vacationers fleeing northern winters.
The style was resolutely modern: streamlined, optimistic, humming with the machine-age energy of a country pulling itself out of the Depression. By the 1970s these buildings were shabby boarding houses, their grandeur forgotten. Then in 1979 a preservation battle led to the creation of the Miami Beach Architectural District — the first twentieth-century historic district in the United States.
The neon was restored, the plaster cleaned. Today Ocean Drive is the backdrop for a global tourism industry. Stand here at dusk and watch the pink light catch those facades.
It looks exactly like a fever dream, and it was always meant to.