ART DECO WEEKEND MIAMI BEACH: Prepare to be Seduced
By Steve Wright
Visitors to the 34th annual Art Deco Weekend will find a playground for the rich and beautiful, a fantasy land of pricey boutique hotels with extravagant restaurants and clubs -- a strip of luxury where Bentleys are almost as common as Buicks and regulars are as flashy as the neon-drenched art deco edifices.
Three decades ago, the Art Deco District was not so fashionable. The charming low-rise buildings -- most built between 1925 and 1945 -- still enjoyed their prime position on the sun-kissed billion dollar sandbar, but nary an heiress or famed designer was interested in them.
Developers, coveting the oceanfront location, said the tarted up little modernist buildings were best suited as rubble cast aside to make way for cookie cutter high rises.
Planners, as well meaning as they were misguided, floated the idea of razing the art deco confections and replacing them with a system of waterways in a man-made, subtropical new Venice.
Thankfully, while most of the U.S. was celebrating the star spangled bicentennial, a Miami Beach woman and her son were working for a way of preserving the careworn art deco treasures that were as tired and down at the heels as the pensioners that inhabited their low rent rooms.
Barbara Baer Capitman and her son, John, created the Miami Design Preservation League and worked with designers Leonard Horowitz and Lillian Barber to identify a concentration of art deco buildings that could become a protected historic district.
By 1979, the South Beach Art Deco District was listed on the National Register of Historic Places – the nation’s first historic district composed of 20th century architecture.
Through the 1980s, the district had its ups and downs while struggling with crime and the unfortunate demolition of several classic deco properties. One by one, the art deco hotels were shored up and spruced up – with many sporting a new pastel palate of tropical colors.
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: MIAMI VICE
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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