Miami: Art Deco and the Atlantic

I was in Miami in January 2015, which is peak season for good reason: the weather is perfect, the art fairs are running, and the city is operating at full output. Miami in summer is a different proposition — the heat and humidity are serious — but January gives you the city at its most accessible and most itself.

The first morning I walked from my hotel on Collins Avenue to the beach before anyone else was up. The Art Deco hotels on Ocean Drive — the Park Central, the Colony, the Cardozo — were still in the early light, their pastels reading differently without the midday sun washing them out. The beach itself, at six in the morning, was empty except for a few joggers and one person doing tai chi at the water's edge. The Atlantic was flat and warm-looking. This is Miami before it switches on, and it is worth getting up for.

South Beach

The South Beach Art Deco Historic District has 800 historically designated buildings — the largest collection of Art Deco architecture in the world. They were saved from demolition in the 1970s and 1980s by a preservation movement that understood their value before most people did. Walking Ocean Drive and Collins Avenue gives you the facades; walking the side streets gives you the residential scale, the alleyways, the courtyard pools, the entire neighbourhood in context.

Wynwood and Little Havana

Wynwood is a former warehouse district north of South Beach that was comprehensively covered in murals starting around 2009, when art collectors bought up the warehouses and invited artists to paint them. The Wynwood Walls — a curated outdoor gallery of large-format murals — is one of the best public art spaces in the country, and the neighbourhood around it is now galleries, studios, cafés, and boutiques in what was recently an industrial zone.

Little Havana — Calle Ocho and the surrounding streets — is the Cuban Miami that existed before all of this. Domino park, the botanicas, the cafés serving Cuban coffee through walk-up windows, the political murals, the music. It is a neighbourhood with a specific cultural weight that the rest of Miami's tourist geography doesn't quite replicate.