Welcome to Miami!

The greater Miami metropolitan area is host to just about every ethnic group and cultural tradition in the world. Situated as it is, in the middle of the Americas with continuously perfect weather, Miami is fast becoming the new cosmopolitan standard of excellence in gastronomy, entertainment, household furnishing, architectural design and fashion, while managing to hold on to its history as the sun and fun capital of the world.

We have selected only a few of the many special neighborhoods in Miami for further attention. These neighborhoods are the best known, the most established, the most popular, and together will provide you with a well-rounded impression of all that Miami has to offer. We encourage you to use this list as your starting point. Your Miami experience will be richer if you leave the beaten path, and venture out on your own to lesser advertised places.

When you get home, you will be asked about the places that are known all over the world. So, start your adventure by selecting the neighborhood which most appeals to you, from our descriptions below, try out some of the best and famous, but then break away afterwards to make some unique discoveries and memories of your own.

Aventura

Aventura is one of the new communities in South Florida, located along the ocean just north of Miami up to the Broward County line. Because it has no history of unmanaged urban sprawl, the shopping malls, resorts and marinas reflect a level of planning and attention to detail with which older communities cannot compete. Its singular lack of historical landmarks and old neighborhoods might seem unreal, yet Aventura's attractiveness lies in the sheer beauty of its contemporary design customized for a hip, modern, urban clientele who are accustomed to surrounding themselves with the best of the best.

In the center of Aventura, around which the rest of the city was built, is the exclusive and classy Turnberry Isle Golf Club. Some of the more expensive condominiums and resorts in South Florida dominate the rest of the town. Lately, the number of working professionals moving to Aventura has been increasing, and though it is possible to find some reasonably-priced housing there now, the city's shopping and other public areas reflect the tastes of the wealthy clientele who still dominate the area.

Even if you don't have the money to park your yacht at the local marina while you shop, you will enjoy the day of shopping, sightseeing and snacking at some of the more contemporary, unusual and top of the line establishments in South Florida just as much as those who do. Try to plan ahead, however, and know where you are going before you embark on your adventure in Aventura. One of the costs of maintaining a state of the art city is that it is almost continuously under construction, which makes carefree car cruising almost impossible. It is better to decide on a few places, park nearby and walk to wherever you want to go. You will appreciate the manicured cleanliness of this new beach city much better on foot than in traffic, and you will come away with some beautiful memories of a day well spent.

Coconut Grove

Although the Grove is one of the oldest areas in metro Miami, it rivals South Beach in its contemporary atmosphere and popularity. Coconut Grove has become the center of Miami's contemporary art and drama communities, as well as home to some of the better examples of nouvelle cuisine in Florida. It is at once small enough to explore in an afternoon, yet so densely furnished with small shops, cafes, playhouses and galleries that even the growing community of artists and patrons who live here never run out of new adventures.

Even if you have no agenda for Coconut Grove, you are guaranteed an unforgettable adventure just by walking around Mayfair and CocoWalk, day or evening. By the time your feet are tired from exploring shops, reading sidewalk café blackboards and announcements about upcoming dramatic events, or writers reading from their own works, you will have a very full agenda in mind for your next visit.

Coral Gables

Just south and a little west of Miami, along Biscayne Bay, is one of the few towns in South Florida which started as a planned community. Although Coral Gables is densely populated and alive with commerce now, the effects of initial planning in the early 1920s have paid off. The University of Miami, which includes one of the better medical schools and hospitals in the country, is surrounded by a residential area landscaped like an Amazonian rain forest, complete with wild parrots and other wild and exotic tropical birds.

The university sprawls throughout the town, and brings with it all manner of professionals and businesses to support every facet of the academic community. The residents are the beneficiaries, as they enjoy some of the best theatre, museums, art galleries and medical services in the country. Because it is possible to live, work and play all in the same beautiful and well-designed town, with downtown Miami, the beaches and the airport each only a few minutes away, it has become an attractive place to live for recent graduates and for younger professionals to set up their practices.

Consequently, the advantages of living in a major university town are making Coral Gables rental and real estate prices almost unaffordable for anyone else. As a place to visit, though, Coral Gables will draw you back again and again. There is a sense of permanence here, of a community that will continue to develop internally, but will remain essentially unchanged in the quality of its character. Yet, something different is happening every day, new plays, concerts come and go, professors giving impromptu lectures on fascinating subjects, enough change to make every visit you make to Coral Gables unique and special.

Design Center

If you are about to re-design or decorate your home, or if you just enjoy being surrounded by art and artists, dedicate a full day to Miami's Buena Vista neighborhood, popularly referred to as the Design District. Miami's artistic community is located in this 18 square block area northwest of the intersection of 2nd Avenue NE and 36th Street. Here you will find examples of ground-breaking furniture and furnishing designs, collected from all over the world, particularly from the Americas, as would be expected for being so close to the Port of Miami.

Although Buena Vista was first settled by a furniture dealer who dedicated the rest of his land to growing pineapples, the land later became too valuable to leave rural. Additional furniture dealers and other businesses arrived, but the real estate prices managed to stay low relative to Miami Beach and South Beach. The area went through its share of urban blight, but when finally cleaned up, began to attract residents with an interest in the arts who were not necessarily amongst the super-wealthy. Miami's Design District differs from other similar metropolitan design centers because it traditionally has catered more to walk-in individual customers than to the trade, although the international design trade does comprise a significant amount of the business conducted here. The artists and merchants of this community are eager to share their talents and acquisitions directly with the customers who will be buying and using their productions, and even seem to enjoy filling an educational role with their clientele. It is this spirit and love amongst the artists and merchants which makes the District more of an artists' community than a design clearinghouse or walking mall. The presence of artists and photographers, as well as furnishings merchants, also lends to the feel of an artists' community.

The artistic atmosphere extends even to the food served in the restaurants and sidewalk cafes in the District. Visiting the Design District is like stepping into another world, where the standards of beauty and artistic excellence are the ruling forces. Pick a day to visit the Design Center when you do not have to be anywhere else immediately before or after, when you can devote an entire day to art, craft and beauty. You would not want to do anything else on such a day, anyway.

Downtown

Aside from the traditional tourist areas, downtown Miami also serves as the multi-lingual business hub of the Americas. You will see all of the world's languages on signs here, as well as hear them spoken by well-dressed businessmen rushing to trans-national meetings in state-of-the-art buildings. Even a stroll amongst the lavishly appointed office buildings in the financial center will tell you that much more is happening here than simply the press of business in a large American metro downtown area. It is obvious that no expense has been spared on architecture and decorative touches, consistent with Miami's new commercial role in this hemisphere.

Miami's downtown area is a world-class metropolitan cultural center that attracts the best musical and dramatic artists, as well as a preview of what you will discover in the smaller neighborhoods which surround it. The breadth of places to explore, from the Bayside open-air market near the Port of Miami, to the art and historical museums, to historic houses like the John Deering estate at Vizcaya, to world-famous symphonic and dramatic performers at the Gusman Center for the Performing Arts, will astonish even the most seasoned traveler. If you have only a little time, pick one or two venues, enjoy them and come back often for additional adventures. Don't try to see it all, as you will be worn out from negotiating the traffic in this relentlessly expanding metro area. The best way to see Miami is on foot, a little bit at a time.

Miami Beach

Traveling north on Collins Avenue from South Beach, your car will pass through a time barrier. Maybe it is the Art Deco architecture which seems exactly as it was when originally built, quite distinguished from its refurbished and modernized counterpart further south. One has the sense that the mild climate, ocean air and baking sun somehow have cooked the antiquity permanently in place, and that you actually have entered the period between two World Wars.

Driving by porch after porch of elderly rockers, surrounded by tubes of neon and those gigantic old stainless steel door handles, against the continuous hum of contemporary commerce, is a jaw-dropping experience. How can these seniors tolerate the new world grown up around them, the new cars with youthful loud radios thumping and whizzing by, one wonders, until it becomes clear in mile after mile of these encampments that it is the new world which must work around the residents. It is their world, and you are only a guest welcome to stay as long as you behave with old-fashioned good sense and consideration.

When you realize that your contemporary car is beginning to feel out of place, by all means, park it. Stop into one of the many bagel shops, delis and restaurants where the offerings and service are as the residents have demanded for decades. Try some of the genuine, home-cooked specials which the residents on fixed budgets depend on, go ahead and have things sliced and prepared the way they used to be, the way they should be. Sit there for a while, and listen to the residents haggling with the shopkeepers and with each other, the same way they did in New York many decades ago, and have been doing ever since.

In stark contrast to South Beach which caters to every taste, Miami Beach is a community of similar but distinct neighborhoods. Merchants and residents all know each other by first name, accommodate the tourists of course, but do not actively encourage them either. No door prizes and wet t-shirt contests here. There are not many places left in America where you can touch and taste cultural and historical uniqueness to this degree, where you can drive through and not see the same array of fast food franchises, motel chains and public signage. Miami Beach is an authentic piece of living history, which will remain sacred and unviolated until the last long-term resident fades away. Thanks to the antiquity-preserving power of its climate, and the tenacity of its residents, Miami Beach should remain as it is for quite some time to come.

South Beach

First time visitors to South Beach, the southern end of Miami Beach which has earned its own name, are tempted to leave after looking for a place to park, or sitting in a traffic jam, but perseverance will yield an unforgettable adventure. Your second and subsequent visits will be much easier as you find your own special paths and places to leave your car behind. South Beach can be explored and enjoyed only by foot. Wherever you go on this special island off of downtown Miami, you will be confronted by breathtaking architecture, hear music pouring out of the clubs, marvel at table after table of the world's most amazing gourmet treats enjoyed by sharply-dressed sidewalk café customers speaking every language known to man, and caught up in the eclectic, anything-goes spirit of individualism which lives and breathes on these streets and beaches.

In order to appreciate fully this noisy, opulent palette of life surrounding you, it is important to know a little of its history. Like most of Florida, just a little more than 100 years ago, Miami Beach was a mosquito-laden, uninhabited island, accessible from the mainland only by boat. The only activity until the first train arrived in 1896, the same year in which Miami was incorporated, was avocado and coconut farming. In addition to these plantation owners, a few wealthy, pioneering souls in search of the ultimate resort also ventured here to be as far away from the city and close to the sun and the ocean as possible. One can imagine walks amongst the dunes, where the city lights disappear for a moment behind a bank of sand, the only light around is from the Moon, and the only noise is the lapping surf. It is easy to understand what attracted the first visitors to this other-worldly land.

The Hurricane of 1926, the most powerful category 4 storm to hit Miami, the only storm in recorded history to have sustained 100 mph winds for more than an hour at a time, and the only storm in recorded history to have average 76 mph winds continuously for longer than 24 hours, literally wiped away everything except the memory of the area as a resort. The stock market crash of 1929 further insulated an area slowly being re-built by a few wealthy families and gangsters like Al Capone. As the economy recovered in the 30s, new money pouring into Miami produced the Art Deco building surge and re-established Miami as a wealthy resort area. Miami's growth hardly skipped a beat even during its occupation by the Army Air Force during the war years. Jackie Gleason's weekly televised programs during the 50s and 60s accurately reflected the glitzy, flashy lifestyle of the nouveau riche in their sub-tropical resort.

In the 60s and 70s, trans-continental transportation became commonplace, other resort areas in the country came into favor, and the city's government began to focus less on maintaining a playground for the wealthy than on developing Miami into a convention center. The effect of this policy change on Miami Beach was devastating. Resorts were replaced by condos, and the young and wealthy were replaced by retirees with declining budgets. The 80s Mariel Boat Lift, while contributing to a solid and productive core which is the present Cuban community, also brought an unfortunate number of less productive souls to our shores. The cocaine-related gang wars during this period, amongst already impoverished senior and ethnic neighborhoods, finished off the last of what remained of old Miami Beach.

Miami Beach, though still heavily populated by senior and ethnic communities, is doing better financially now, and has normalized into a fairly conservative, though intensely historical, neighborhood. South Beach, however, which began in the late 80s and early 90s, is the latest renaissance of Miami Beach. Though physically connected, South Beach has taken what remains of Miami Beach, refurbished it in the image of its Art Deco origins, preserved and restored many original buildings, and has added a thoroughly contemporary, cosmopolitan, world-class skin. Still, as you sample some of the best Sushi in the world, listen to world-class live musicians of all genres, catch a glimpse of a famous person weaving through the crowds, and notice some of the most beautiful, tanned people you have ever seen in your life, it is possible to close your eyes and imagine those early years of quiet, sun, surf and moonlight. These elements are still present, and are still the secret behind South Beach, and no hurricane, gangster, cultural revolution, or even world-class resort and entertainment center can compete with their timeless beauty.