ART DECO WEEKEND MIAMI BEACH
Prepare to be Seduced
By Steve Wright
The Miami Design Preservation League, the little upstart group founded by the Capitmans and their friends in 1976, still produces Art Deco Weekend, has a spectacularly-restored welcome center on Ocean Drive.
The MDPL’s Art Deco Welcome Center, which doubles as an outstanding gift shop, is in the historic nautical deco Miami Beach Auditorium at 1001 Ocean Drive.
The welcome center phone is 305-531-3484 and the league’s administrative offices can be reached at 305-672-2014.
The MDPL, which works year round as the world’s oldest art deco society, has a redesigned website (click on the Art Deco Weekend button) at: http://www.mdpl.org
To accommodate pedestrians, Ocean Drive is closed between 5th and 15th streets. Parking is at a premium, but there are several city lots including garages on 7th, 12th, 13th and 17th streets just a block or two west of Ocean Drive.
Guided walking tours, including a tour in Spanish each of the three festival days, last 90 minutes and are held at several intervals each day.
At last count, there were almost as many books about Miami Beach art deco as club goers with physician-enhanced physiques. The cream of the ever-growing deco literature crop includes: Deco Delights: Preserving Miami Beach Architecture, penned by the late Barbara Capitman herself; South Beach Deco: Step by Step, written by artist and MDPL stalwart Iris Garnett Chase; and Discovering South Beach Deco: walking Tours in the Miami Beach Art Deco District, created by decophiles Richard Beaubien and Valerie Beaubien.
Wright first visited Art Deco Weekend as an Ohioan in the late 1990s and vowed to stay. Within three years, he was living in an historic Spanish Mission style home in Little Havana and making weekly sojourns across Biscayne Bay to photograph Miami Beach’s art deco.
TOMORROW: HOTEL AND RESTAURANT INFORMATION
Art Deco Weekend will take place January 14-16 2011 in Miami Beach.
For details, visit the Miami Design Preservation League website at http://www.mdpl.org
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