Art Deco Welcome Center - Where the Rescue Began

A stop on Miami Beach: Art Deco District Walk, a free self-guided tour.

Start at the headquarters of the people who saved South Beach. The Art Deco Welcome Center and Museum is run by the Miami Design Preservation League, which Barbara Baer Capitman and a small group of allies founded in 1976. Back then many of these hotels were shabby lodgings for retirees, and developers wanted to clear them for towers. Capitman lobbied, marched and stood with protesters in front of bulldozers. Some buildings were lost, including the Senator and New Yorker hotels, but in 1979 this became the first urban 20th-century historic district on the National Register of Historic Places, with about 960 historic buildings.

Look at the building on the ocean side, too. The Beach Patrol headquarters, designed by Robert Taylor around 1934, has porthole windows and railings like a ship's bridge, a textbook piece of nautical Streamline Moderne.

Step inside for maps, exhibits and guided tours; the center is open daily, and a bronze bust of Capitman stands in the park nearby.

Getting here: Begin at 1001 Ocean Drive, on the beach side of the road at 10th Street.

Did you know?: The district's famous pastel paint jobs came later: in the 1980s, League co-founder and designer Leonard Horowitz picked the candy colors that helped turn tired hotels into postcard stars.

Photo op: Step onto the lawn on the beach side to frame the Beach Patrol building's portholes, railings and flagpole against the sky.

More on Wikipedia: Miami Beach Architectural District · Barbara Baer Capitman · Streamline Moderne

Art Deco Welcome Center - Where the Rescue Began

Stops on this tour