Miami Audio Tour

Highlights

• Brickell Financial District

  Glass towers close in as you enter Brickell, Miami's financial district and perhaps the most dramatic example of the city's transformation from resort town to international metropolis. Through most of the twentieth century, Brickell Avenue was a quiet residential street of Mediterranean mansions occupied by Miami's Anglo elite, nicknamed 'Millionaire's Row' long before that term migrated to Miami Beach's Collins Avenue.

• 
  Vizcaya Museum and Gardens

  At the gates of Vizcaya you face the most astonishing private residence ever built in Florida and one of the great Gilded Age estates in America. James Deering, heir to the International Harvester fortune, began construction in 1914 and completed the main house in 1916, employing a thousand workers — a tenth of Miami's entire population at the time — to build an Italian Renaissance palazzo on ten acres of Biscayne Bay waterfront.

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  Espanola Way

  Two blocks of pink and cream stucco open ahead of you on Espanola Way, looking as if they were airlifted from a Spanish colonial village and set down between two Art Deco blocks. That was exactly the developer's intention.

• 
  Ocean Drive Art Deco Strip

  Notice Ocean Drive, arguably the most photographed street in America. The buildings flanking you — low-slung, pastel-painted, their facades decorated with racing stripes, porthole windows, and eyebrow sunshades — are the finest concentration of Art Deco architecture in the world.

• 
  Wynwood Arts District

  Wynwood, the arts district you have entered, is one of the most-cited examples of arts-led neighborhood transformation in the United States, with all the complications that phrase implies. Through the mid-2000s this was a Puerto Rican working-class neighborhood transitioning to warehouse and light industrial use, with vacancy rates climbing as manufacturing left.

All 40 stops

• Ocean Drive Art Deco Strip (South Beach)

  Notice Ocean Drive, arguably the most photographed street in America.

• Art Deco Historic District Welcome Center (South Beach)

  Here at the Miami Design Preservation League's Welcome Center, you have reached the nerve center of the movement that saved South Beach from the wrecking…

• The Wolfsonian Museum (South Beach)

  Your eyes meet the Wolfsonian, a museum that began as a storage facility and ended as one of the great repositories of propaganda design in…

• Lincoln Road Mall (South Beach)

  Lincoln Road, under your feet, is a pedestrian mall that reinvented itself so many times it has become a kind of urban case study.

• Bass Museum of Art (South Beach)

  Your gaze meets the Bass Museum, one of Miami Beach's quiet cultural anchors and a building that rewards a slow look.

• Espanola Way (South Beach)

  Two blocks of pink and cream stucco open ahead of you on Espanola Way, looking as if they were airlifted from a Spanish colonial village…

• South Pointe Park (South Beach)

  Your walk brings you to the southern tip of Miami Beach, where the island tapers to a point between the Atlantic Ocean and Government Cut…

• South Beach Overview (South Beach)

  South Beach, where you now find yourself, is one of the great resort strips of the twentieth century and one of the great second acts…

• Lummus Park (South Beach)

  Your walk continues into Lummus Park, the long green ribbon between Ocean Drive and the Atlantic, and one of the oldest public spaces on Miami…

• Overtown — Harlem of the South (Overtown)

  Overtown, where you have arrived, is one of the most significant and most damaged neighborhoods in Miami's history.

• HistoryMiami Museum (Downtown Miami)

  Outside HistoryMiami, you face the city's primary repository of its own complicated past, housed in the Miami-Dade Cultural Center complex designed by architect Philip Johnson…

• Bayfront Park (Downtown Miami)

  Bayfront Park is Miami's waterfront civic commons, with Biscayne Bay spread ahead of you and the downtown skyline rising behind.

• Flagler Street (Downtown Miami)

  Flagler Street, the pavement under your feet, is Miami's original commercial spine, named for the man who made the city possible.

• Pérez Art Museum Miami (Downtown Miami / Museum Park)

  Ahead of you rises the Pérez Art Museum Miami, known as PAMM, one of the most striking buildings on the Miami skyline and a marker…

• Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Science (Downtown Miami / Museum Park)

  Since 2017 the Frost Science Museum, Miami's state-of-the-art science center, has anchored Museum Park alongside the Pérez Art Museum, and it now rises in front…

• Wynwood Arts District (Wynwood)

  Wynwood, the arts district you have entered, is one of the most-cited examples of arts-led neighborhood transformation in the United States, with all the complications…

• Wynwood Walls (Wynwood)

  Step through the gate of the Wynwood Walls, the outdoor museum of street art that became the catalyst for the neighborhood's transformation and one of…

• Design District (Design District)

  Dior, Louis Vuitton, Hermès, Prada, Rolex: you have reached the Miami Design District, a neighborhood that began as an arts incubator and completed the journey…

• Little Havana Overview (Little Havana)

  When Fidel Castro took power in 1959, Cuban exiles settled in the neighborhood whose edge you have reached: Little Havana, the heart of Cuban exile…

• Calle Ocho / SW 8th Street (Little Havana)

  Calle Ocho, SW 8th Street, runs under your feet: the main commercial artery of Little Havana and one of the most culturally layered streets in…

• Domino Park / Máximo Gómez Park (Little Havana)

  Listen for the click and slap of tiles at Máximo Gómez Park, known universally as Domino Park, one of the most human-scaled and moving public…

• Versailles Restaurant (Little Havana)

  Versailles Restaurant, in front of you, has fed Cuban Miami for more than fifty years and served as an informal capital of the exile community's…

• Tower Theater (Little Havana)

  A 1926 movie palace rises ahead of you: the Tower Theater, an unlikely landmark of Cuban exile culture in Miami.

• Brickell Financial District (Brickell)

  Glass towers close in as you enter Brickell, Miami's financial district and perhaps the most dramatic example of the city's transformation from resort town to…

• Brickell Key (Brickell)

  One causeway has carried you onto Brickell Key, a small island in Biscayne Bay tied to the Brickell mainland and one of Miami's more peculiar…

• Vizcaya Museum and Gardens (Coconut Grove)

  At the gates of Vizcaya you face the most astonishing private residence ever built in Florida and one of the great Gilded Age estates in…

• Coconut Grove (Coconut Grove)

  Banyan trees shade you in Coconut Grove, the oldest continuously inhabited neighborhood in Miami-Dade County and, in many ways, the city's anti-Miami: shaded, slow-paced, draped…

• Peacock Park (Coconut Grove)

  Peacock Park spreads out in front of you, the waterfront green space at the heart of old Coconut Grove, named for Charles and Isabella Peacock…

• Coconut Grove Playhouse (Coconut Grove)

  The Coconut Grove Playhouse, in front of you, is a 1927 building with a theatrical history that mirrors the arc of Miami's cultural ambitions.

• Coral Gables City Hall (Coral Gables)

  Coral Gables City Hall, facing you, is the civic centerpiece of one of the most ambitious planned communities in American history.

• Biltmore Hotel (Coral Gables)

  Back in January 1926 the Biltmore Hotel you face opened as one of the great resort hotels of the twentieth century, and it has survived…

• Miracle Mile, Coral Gables (Coral Gables)

  Half a mile of wide sidewalk runs ahead of you along Miracle Mile, the four-block commercial heart of Coral Gables, a name that was pure…

• Venetian Pool (Coral Gables)

  George Merrick created the Venetian Pool, in front of you, from a coral rock quarry in 1924, and it remains the most beautiful public swimming…

• Mid-Beach / Millionaire's Row (Miami Beach)

  Millionaire's Row is what this stretch of Collins Avenue in Miami Beach's Mid-Beach area was historically called, and you are on it.

• Collins Avenue Grand Hotels (Miami Beach)

  Collins Avenue stretches ahead of you, the long straight artery that runs the length of Miami Beach and traces the full arc of its resort…

• Fontainebleau Hotel (Miami Beach)

  Morris Lapidus became famous with the building in front of you, the Fontainebleau Hotel, which set the template for the American resort hotel in the…

• Surfside / Champlain Towers Site (Surfside)

  On June 24, 2021, the Champlain Towers South condominium complex collapsed near where you now pause, killing 98 people in one of the deadliest structural…

• Bal Harbour Shops (Bal Harbour)

  Bal Harbour Shops, the outdoor luxury mall you have reached, has been called the most profitable retail real estate in the world per square foot…

• Edgewater / Early Miami History (Edgewater)

  Cranes rise in every direction in Edgewater, the bayfront neighborhood north of downtown where you now walk, simultaneously one of Miami's oldest residential areas and…

• Miami Founding Site / Flagler Hotel 1896 (Downtown Miami)

  Incorporated on July 28, 1896, with a population of 343, the City of Miami was born near where you now walk, at the time one…

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