South Beach, where you now find yourself, is one of the great resort strips of the twentieth century and one of the great second acts in American urban history. Miami Beach was created almost entirely from dredge fill. Carl Fisher, an Indianapolis car-parts millionaire who'd already built the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, bought land here in 1913 and began pumping sand from the bay floor to build an island.
By the 1920s he was marketing it to northern vacationers as the American Riviera, and hotels began rising along Collins Avenue. The 1920s boom collapsed with the 1926 hurricane and the 1929 crash, but the 1930s brought a second wave: smaller, cheaper hotels in the Art Deco style that defined the neighborhood. Jewish families from New York were the predominant guests, and by the 1940s Miami Beach had the largest Jewish resort culture outside the Catskills.
The neighborhood declined in the 1970s, when those aging retirees were replaced by poverty and crime. Its resurrection — Art Deco preservation, the fashion photography industry, the club scene, the international tourist trade — is one of the most unlikely urban comebacks in American history.