ARCHITECTURE
Preservation in Miami Beach has always been about more than architecture. For decades, the sandbars of the man-made beaches have needed replenishing in order to give the illusion of their natural occurrence. And now, preservation is rapidly becoming improbable. Because of the area’s flat topography and porous bedrock, it is uniquely prone to continual flooding. This risks contaminating the freshwater aquifers and wells with saltwater and septic sewage, and all of the canals, pump stations, and sluice gates that currently prevent the ocean from intruding on the city won’t endure the estimated sea-level rise given current rates of carbon emissions. A 2015 study by the National Academy of Sciences proposed “lock-in dates” for around 1,800 endangered coastal urban areas in the US, the date by which a city’s future underwater fate is essentially sealed. Miami’s lock-in date has passed, making it one of the cities that lead study author Benjamin H. Strauss describes as “already lost.”
Miami Beach has always been a preservation project on a mass scale. In 1910, Indiana-born entrepreneur and automobile enthusiast Carl G. Fisher came to town. The mangrove jungle and barrier island between the Atlantic Ocean and Biscayne Bay that is now Miami Beach had already been partially filled and channeled with canals, the land marshaled into a middling plantation venture to grow coconuts. Envisioning the perfect beach getaway at the end of the Dixie Highway (which he had helped sponsor), Fisher loaned $200,000 to other local developers to complete the bridge over Biscayne Bay and to begin logging the mangroves, cutting drainage channels, and bringing in soil to turn the unlikely sandbar into an island.
The boosters succeeded in designating the town of what became Miami Beach in 1915, jumpstarting South Florida’s real estate bubble of the 1920s. Biscayne Bay was dredged, sections of the Everglades were drained to create dry land, and real estate prices rose by more than 1,000 percent over the next ten years. Fisher built a $65,000 beachfront house named The Shadows as well as the Flamingo Hotel, festooned by a rooftop dome with floodlights visible to ships at sea.
Luxury didn’t last forever: The combined catastrophes of the 1926 hurricane and the 1929 stock market crash ended the local real estate boom. As development became more modest, the fantastical artifice of the 1920s Mediterranean Revival style, all stucco walls and delicate loggias, gradually evened out into the streamlined silhouettes and winking, eyebrowed windows of Art Deco, Depression Moderne, and eventually midcentury modernism, reflecting Miami Beach’s new identity as a working- and middle-class resort.
The American adoption of the Parisian Art Deco style had come to embody a kind of exuberance synonymous with the twentieth-century boom of American capital. Manhattan’s skyscrapers, Detroit’s automobile industry, Los Angeles’s civic engineering—the modernist spirit infused them all with a story of ebullient progress untethered from the history-laden revivalism of the nineteenth century. During the 1930s, with its labor strikes and social welfare policies, its progressive social engineering and blossoming of public institutions, design courted populism. The people, modernists argued, deserved well-made things they could use. This was architecture for the masses, but it was also about mass consumption. In design as in all things, the preservation of American progress meant, necessarily, the preservation of American capital. As the Wolfsonian–Florida International University in Miami Beach contends in an ongoing exhibition, “Deco: Luxury to Mass Market,” Art Deco evolved into a truly American design style when “American designers adapted a style associated with European luxury to the demands of industrial mass production.”
Throughout the postwar decades, the distinctive structures of Miami Beach fell into disrepair. Founded in 1976, the MDPL succeeded three years later in having the island’s dilapidated huddle of Art Deco, Moderne, and Mediterranean Revival buildings designated as federal historic sites, defining the unique style of MiMo—Miami Modernism—in the process. The MDPL’s efforts can be pinned to a rise in the city’s fortunes. Andy Warhol asked for a tour of Miami’s Art Deco architecture in 1980; Miami Vice first aired in 1984, turning South Beach’s rundown streets into a backdrop for urban cool. Gianni Versace moved there in 1992, and the combination of queer bohemia and fashion-fueled luxury gave the built environment a campy glamour. It was de rigueur for cultural critics in the ’90s to single out downtown Miami’s architecture—particularly the rectangular doughnut of Arquitectonica’s Atlantis Condominium with a five-story palm court cut out of its center, famous from the opening credits of Miami Vice—as emblematic of the postmodern condition, empty of referents and narrative, a city of flashy anomie. That story of Miami is, I now think, wrong. Rather than give up on meaning, we must find other cultural and political narratives to help us live with the wreckage we have inherited. Whom and what we love, whom and what we save, and how we mourn the things we’re certain to lose are now becoming urgent questions of preservation.
Daniel Ciraldo, the MDPL’s executive director, defines preservation as “adaptive reuse,” thinking of a neighborhood not as “frozen in time” but as a collocation of “vital, thriving communities.” Miami Waterkeeper, an environmental group devoted to protecting South Florida’s watershed, follows a multipronged approach of advocacy, education, green infrastructure, and legal planning. But neither organization, understandably, is willing to admit in their public communications that Miami may be unsalvageable—that preservation, at this point, might entail a planned exodus from the city and careful, democratic decisions about how to preserve lives and lifeways.
ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI, I went to Joe’s Stone Crab restaurant—arguably as old as Miami Beach itself—at the tip of South Beach to order their house specialty. The menu explained that the crab was “sustainably fished”: Only its oversize pincer arms are harvested, and the living crab is thrown back into the ocean where the arms regrow, possibly to be harvested again and again. Only half of the crabs die from the treatment—obviously a better survival rate than conventional crabbing—but to consider the embodied experience of the crab is terrifying. I ordered and ate the crab. It was delicious, but nothing about it felt good. The fate of the Florida stone crab feels eerily entwined to that of Miami Beach’s historic districts; you can’t help wondering if today’s efforts at sustainability and preservation miss the larger point.
The new buzzword for adapting urban environments to climate change and related natural disasters is resiliency—a term that does seem to imply some understanding of cities as part of their environmental setting. But as Ashley Dawson expertly notes in Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change (2017), this jargon is hopeful but empty, seeking “to offer adaptive solutions without addressing the political roots of contemporary social risk and disaster.” At best, the language of resiliency offers adaptive solutions like green infrastructure and social planning for expected sea-level rise. At worst, it vaguely gestures toward a future fix, while untenable carbon emissions and development continue unabated. In general, resiliency promises progress as an automatic feature of social and political life; in this, it is an old story masquerading as a new one.
In 2017, the MDPL launched the Center for Resiliency and Sustainability to advocate for “historic preservation” as “a critical contributor to stated goals of long-term sustainability and social, economic, and environmental resiliency.” In a recent workshop at the MDPL, titled “Buoyant City,” University of Miami professor and architect Allan Shulman advanced an approach of optimism and creative design in the face of climate emergency, arguing that Miami Beach was too culturally valuable to let sink and that “retreat was not an option.” Rather, he said, the crisis was an “opportunity” to build an “adaptive and resilient city.” But this seems willfully naive or willfully shortsighted: Given Miami’s certain flooding within a generation, current proposals to raise sidewalks and turn Flamingo Park into a reservoir seem like desperate stopgaps.
Miami Beach Rising Above is the island’s initiative to address climate change, and it defines resiliency as the capacity of “a city to survive, adapt, and grow no matter what kinds of chronic stresses and acute shocks” occur. The chronic stresses and acute shocks that can be expected include king tides as well as coastal, rainwater, and groundwater flooding, which will result in the breaching of freshwater wells by saltwater and the sinking of septic tanks below the water table, contaminating the aquifer. Research by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows that the streets of Miami and Miami Beach could flood every single day by 2070. Here are the unforeseen effects of American progress: The canals and channels first cut to drain the Everglades and fuel South Florida’s development—the ones that turned the mangrove jungle of Miami Beach into a plantation and then a resort town—are now the perfect conduits to bring seawater into the city.
Nonetheless, luxury real estate development continues in Miami Beach and offers an effective way to gauge what is, in fact, now being preserved there. The island city hosts around 14 percent of Miami-Dade County’s property value, on less than 1 percent of the county’s land, and the ultrarich purchase condominiums as investments that appreciate at a rate of 5 to 10 percent a year. The unfinished condos at 87 Park on Collins Avenue, designed by the prestigious Renzo Piano Building Workshop, for example, sell for between two and sixty-eight million dollars. The entrenched desire to preserve capital is one narrative that has not yet been broken.
“The Greater Miami and the Beaches’ Preliminary Resilience Assessment,” funded by the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities Network, is a graphic-heavy set of PowerPoint slides in bright colors, with vague bullet points about new “Programs,” achievable “Strategies,” and recently founded “Working Groups.” “Living with water” is floated as the city’s new brand for tourism and stormwater management. Resiliency, it seems, means branding and marketing clichés, because resiliency, even in the face of the increasingly dire facts, cannot disabuse itself of entrenched narratives of economic development and American progress—of the belief that it’s possible to, in the strained metaphor of the Assessment, “bounce forward, not just bounce back.”
The people and city of Greater Miami deserve much better. We are running out of options, and soon we may only have a choice about how best to mourn what has vanished. Inevitably now, Miami will flood—the seawalls will breach, the pumps will be inundated, the oceans will acidify, the sidewalks won’t be raised high enough. If we cannot preserve the architectural historic districts for more than a few more decades, we should bend our collective will toward preserving its best features: its minimalist version of beauty, its initial democratic and civic ethos, its playful belief that form and function ought to be married by thoughtful design. For what is now being preserved in Miami Beach is the moribund promise of American progress, a desperate bid for security against the coming king tide.
Jessie Kindig is an editor at Verso Books, and her essays have appeared in n+1, the Boston Review, and Jacobin, among other publications.
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