Miami Lifestyle

Miami's pulse pounds  with nonstop nightlife that reflects the area's potent cultural mix. On sultry, humid nights with the huge full moon rising out of the ocean and fragrant night-blooming jasmine intoxicating the senses, who can resist Cuban salsa, Jamaican reggae, and Dominican merengue, with some disco and hip hop thrown in for good measure? When this place throws a party, hips shake, fingers snap, bodies touch. It's no wonder many clubs are still rocking at 5 am.
The reputation of Miami and Miami Beach as playgrounds for the hip and famous is well deserved, making the nightlife here some of the best on the planet. But if you are in search of finer cultural fare, you face more of a challenge. The museums aren't as easy to find as the beaches. Theaters don't advertise as widely as nightclubs. And the art house that show foreign films and independents are tucked away in the city's nooks and crannies. All that starting to change, however, so you have your pick of entertainment here night and day. Whether you are interested in dancing 'till dawn to the hottest DJs or catching the newest work by Latin artists in exile, you'll want to head to a newsstand first.

Miami Art Deco Hotels

The story begins in the 1920s when Miami Beach established itself as America's Winter Playground. Long before Las Vegas got the idea, Miami Beach sprouted hostelries resembling Venetian palaces, Spanish villages, and French chateaux. To complement the social activities of the hotels, the city provided gambling and bootleg whiskey. Miami became a haven for out-of-town high rollers.
In the early 1930s drawn south by the prospect of warm beaches and luxurious tropical surrounding, middle-class tourists fueled a second boom. More hotels had to be build, but it wouldn't do for Miami to open the same type of boring, staid hotels found across America. En masse, architects decided the motif of choice would be..art deco.
A uniform style soon marked Miami's new hotels. A vertical central element raced past the roofline and into the sky to create a sense of motion. To add to the illusion that these immobile buildings were rapidly speeding objects, colorful bands known as racing stripes were painted around the corners. In keeping with the beachside setting, designers adorned hotels with nautical elements. Portholes appeared in sets of three of facades or within buildings. Images of seaweed, starfish, and rolling ocean waves were plastered, painted, or etched on walls. Some of the buildings looked as if they were ready to go to sea.