Florida is flip-flops at breakfast, lunch and dinner. Florida is Disney,
SeaWorld and Universal. Florida is swaying palms and creeping jasmine,
live oak and bamboo. Florida is ‘gators’, panthers and gentle manatees.
Florida is 825 miles of beaches. Florida is the fishing capital of the
world and a diver’s delight. Florida is Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, and
the first space explorers. Florida is fresh oranges and grapefruit
outside your door. Florida is baseball, motor racing and golf. Florida
is Art Basel and art deco. Florida is sunrise on the Atlantic and sunset
on the Gulf of Mexico.
Trip Idea in Florida:
South Beach
Admire art deco architecture and do some world-class people-watching
Some places and times just go together, and South
Beach seems right now to be one of those places, embodying the cultural
mix of fashion, celebrity, design, hip beach culture and wealth that
defines American fabulousness. The city's location as a kind of centre
point between Europe, New York, L.A. and South America has no doubt
contributed to its current ascendancy, but credit must also go to
Miami’s architectural forefathers, who between the late '20s and early
'40s built a backdrop as beautiful as today's bronzed and buffed
denizens.
South Beach’s Architectural District—aka the art deco
district—crowds into a mere one square mile some 800 pastel-coloured
buildings in the art deco, streamline moderne and Mediterranean Revival
styles. Altogether, it is the largest concentration of 1920s, ’30s and
’40s resort architecture in the U.S. Tours are available from the Miami
Design Preservation League, but there’s every chance you’ll get
distracted from the architecture—all painted in the district’s trademark
teals, lavenders, pinks and peaches—by the alarmingly good-looking
parade of people on and off the beach. On Ocean Drive, the 24-hour News
Café was one of the fixtures of the South Beach renaissance and is still
one of the best people-watching spots in town. Five blocks away, News
Café spinoff Café Cardozo (in Gloria Estefan’s Cardozo Hotel) lets you
step out of the path of the year-round tourist crush while still
enjoying people watching. On Lincoln Road, the half-retro, half-chic
Nexxt Café serves models and film stars from a huge menu. At night, head
to Crobar for dancing and gawking, the Delano Hotel’s Rose Bar for
cocktails or the Shore Club’s SkyBar, where all the world’s a stage.