South Beach

South Beach is the southern end of Miami Beach, a barrier island separated from the mainland by Biscayne Bay. The beach runs from South Pointe up to about 23rd Street, wide and straight, with Lummus Park and then Ocean Drive behind it.

Its fame rests on architecture and on a rescue. The Art Deco district behind the sand — around eight hundred buildings from the 1920s and 30s — was slated for demolition in the 1970s and saved by a preservation campaign; the pastel restoration that followed, and the fashion photography that came with it in the 1980s, made South Beach an image. The lifeguard stands, rebuilt after Hurricane Andrew as individually designed structures, are now as photographed as the buildings.

The shore is wide quartz sand with a long gentle slope and warm Atlantic water. Almost none of it is original: Miami Beach lost its beach to erosion by the 1970s and a federal renourishment project rebuilt it, and that work continues. The width people find remarkable is the width the Corps of Engineers decided on. There is no reef and little to snorkel.

Development is a city that runs on this beach. Hotels and restaurants along Ocean Drive, a promenade and cycle path, chair and umbrella concessions on the sand, and a stretch north of 21st Street where toplessness is customary. The beach is public along its length and the entry points are frequent. South Pointe Park at the very bottom of the island is the quieter end, with the cruise channel running past it and a pier that people fish from; the crowd thins noticeably below 5th Street and again north of 23rd.

Art Deco from the 1930s that a preservation campaign saved from demolition in the 1970s, and a beach behind it that is almost entirely engineered — the sand was pumped in from offshore from 1977 because the natural beach had gone. Miami Beach is now spending heavily on sea-level rise, and the pumps are the older half of the same argument.