Coral Gables Miami Riviera

Developer George Merrick created perhaps the most successful and enduring planned community in South Florida: Coral Gables. The foundation of this 1920s suburb was its unique architecture set in a tropical landscape. With elaborate Spanish, Venetian, Moorish, and Italian design, grandiose public spaces, and monumental civic buildings, Coral Gables embodied the urban planning ideals of the early twentieth-century City Beautiful movement.

Merrick hired a team of architects, including his cousin H. George Fink, Beaux-Arts designer Walter de Garmo, and Philadelphian Phineas Paist to oversee all aspects of design. Adding to the Mediterranean features of Coral Gables was the lush tropical setting, enhanced by the landscape design of Frank M. Button. Add to that forty miles of waterfront, and Merrick could boast that Coral Gables was "the Miami Riviera."