Aloha to Miami Beach - Art Deco Style (Part 1)

 

While my son and his friend enjoyed the white sand of South Beach, I walked around to absorb the Art Deco style.  From the Miami Design Preservation League (link),

The Miami Design Preservation League (MDPL) was formed through the efforts of Barbara Baer Capitman and her son John Capitman. The initial impetus was to find a project to honor the United States’ bicentennial; the Capitmans worked with designers Leonard Horowitz and Lillian Barber to identify a concentration of 1930s buildings in South Miami Beach that the group felt could be a historic district of 20th century architecture.

I popped into the Art Deco Welcome Center.

across from Barbara Capitman Way.

Love the name of this restaurant, Ocean's Ten, at the corner of Ocean Drive and 10th Street.  Love the vintage car, too.

I walked out to the beach to find this colorful lifeguard station

and a seagull looking for a snack!

Even the Beach Patrol embraces the Art Deco style.

I didn't have time to take an official Art Deco tour, but I did see a few of the landmarks.  From Visit Florida (link),

Essex House, a hotel built in 1938, still has an overstuffed couch and chair in the lobby, just like it did in the 1930s. It also has an original Earl LePan mural from that period showing the Everglades. The mural sits over the fireplace.

A story goes that the hotel owner's wife asked LePan why there were no alligators in the mural. The next morning, he knocked on her door and asked if she would come downstairs. She put on a kimono and descended the stairs to see that overnight he had painted a small alligator in the upper left-hand side of the mural. She screamed when she saw it. If bookies were sitting in the overstuffed chairs, did they take bets on this scene – would he or would he not paint the alligator? Another version of the story is that LePan added the alligator when he refreshed the painting in the 80s, as he had always regretted not painting one. It is all part of a history, long gone but not forgotten.

Walking down Ocean Drive was a step back into Art Deco history.

Have you visited Miami Beach?  Or seen Art Deco in other cities?  One randomly selected commenter from this week's blog posts wins a book choice from my convention stash. Comments are open through Saturday, June 11, 10 pm in Baltimore. I'll post the winner on Sunday, June 12, at SOS Aloha.

Mahalo,

Kim in Baltimore
Aloha Spirit in Charm City

My office bag thanks Barbara 

for her preservation.