From Urban Citizens to Ocean Liners: Miami Beach Hotels and the Enclosure Movement,1935-1955

Abstract

This article analyzes changes in hotel urbanism in Miami Beach. Most of the Art Deco hotels built between 1935 and 1942 were “urban citizens”—visually integrated into an ensemble of architecturally similar buildings and economically integrated into a symbiotic leisure economy where urban hostels, nightclubs, and luxury retailers combined to offer a diverse collection of tourists a vacation of “accessible glamour” that made Miami Beach distinctive among resorts. At the same time, another approach to hotel urbanism exemplified a strategy of enclosing leisure businesses. Autonomous resorts were more like ocean liners than urban citizens: providing guests with self-contained vacation spaces that kept them apart from the city. The enclosure movement reached its pinnacle in the postwar era with a new generation of hotels epitomized by the Fontainebleau. This article discusses the consequences of the enclosure movement for nightclubs and luxury retailers, relating their disappearance to the city’s postwar decline.