Collins Avenue - From Deco to MiMo

Photo: P. Hughes, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped)

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

Walk up Collins Avenue and you can watch Miami Beach architecture grow up. The street is named for John S. Collins, the developer whose Collins Bridge first linked the island to the mainland across Biscayne Bay in 1913. By the late 1930s, hotels along here were growing bigger and taller than the small inns on Ocean Drive.

Look north from 16th Street. Roy France's National Hotel, designed in 1939 and opened in 1940, wears a square dome crowned with a silver sphere. Beside it rises the Delano, designed by Robert Swartburg and opened in 1948, its stepped tower ending in a finned crown. It was one of the tallest buildings in Miami Beach when new and one of the earliest postwar MiMo hotels.

On the east side at Lincoln Road stands the 1953 DiLido Hotel by Morris Lapidus, now the Ritz-Carlton South Beach. MiMo, short for Miami Modern, took Deco's optimism into the jet age: glamorous, curvy and a little theatrical.

Getting here: Walk west on 13th Street to Collins Avenue, then north about three blocks to 16th Street.

Did you know?: The National Hotel's pool is about 205 feet long, one of the longest hotel pools in the United States.

Photo op: From the west side of Collins at 16th Street, look north to catch the National's dome and the Delano's finned tower together.

More on Wikipedia: Collins Avenue · Delano Miami Beach Hotel · Morris Lapidus · John S. Collins

Collins Avenue - From Deco to MiMo

Stops on this tour