| Modernism |
| Year | Month | Day | Event | Related
Resource |
| 1929 | | | The North Bay Causeway opened. It linked Miami Beach with the mainland at what is today Seventy-ninth Street. The intersection at Seventy-ninth and Biscayne Boulevard subsequently gained importance, and as Miami emerged from the Great Depression and later World War II, it and its outlying areas experienced a period of intense development. Many of the buildings near this intersection built in the 1950s and 1960s were designed along classic Modernist lines. | |
| 1946 | | | The Sherry Frontenac opened in Miami Beach. The construction of this hotel, designed by Henry Hohauser, marked a shift in the epicenter of tourist activity from the Lincoln Road area of Miami Beach to an area just north where hotels such as the Sherry Frontenac, the Delano, and the Fontainebleau were being built. There were certain aspects of the hotel's design, such as its smokestacks and "gangplank" bridge, that were quintessentially Art Deco. | display |
| 1947 | | | The Delano Hotel opened on Miami Beach next door to the National Hotel. The hotel was designed in the Art Deco style by Robert M. Swarthburg. | |
| 1948 | | | The Saxony Hotel opened in Miami Beach. It was designed by Roy France, who also designed the National Hotel of 1940. The Modernist Saxony was part of a new generation of hotels built in Miami and Miami Beach. It and many of the other new buildings lacked the ornamental Art Deco motifs that were to be seen for the last times in the designs of the Sherry Frontenac and the Delano hotels. | display |
| 1949 | | | The Casablanca Hotel opened. Roy France designed the hotel, which was named after the famous film staring Humphrey Bogart. The hotel can be described as Modernist in its design, but it also incorporated elements of the International Style and Hollywood-themed kitsch. The latter of these came to influence the way developers in Las Vegas, Nevada designed their resorts decades later. | display |
| 1951 | | | The Bombay Hotel opened. The hotel's name was later changed to the Golden Sands Hotel. It was the first hotel in Miami Beach to offer its guests a parking garage. Norman M. Giller designed the building. On why his was the first hotel to have a garage, Giller said that, "in the Art Deco days we were in a Depression, so nobody was thinking about cars, because not too many people had them." | |
| 1953 | | | The Lido Spa opened on Belle Isle along the Venetian Causeway. | |
| 1957 | | | The Deauville Miami Beach Resort Hotel opened on Miami Beach. It stood on the site of what had been the McFadden Deauville Casino, and hosted acts such as the Beatles, Sammy Davis Jr., Frank Sinatra, and Dean Martin. Melvin Grossman, a protege of the renowned Modernist architect Morris Lapidus, designed the hotel. | |
| 1960 | | | The Lincoln Road Mall was built in Miami Beach. Lincoln Road business owners felt threatened by the trend towards building large tourist hotels with their own selection of upscale shops, such as the Fontainebleau, that were blocks away from Lincoln Road. They taxed themselves in order to raise the necessary funds for a large revitalization project. Morris Lapidus, designer of the Fontainebleau and other Miami Beach hotels, was hired for the project. Soon, the Lincoln Road Mall became one of the most significant arena for Modernist architecture in Miami Beach. | display |
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