Miami Audio Tours

Miami was incorporated as a city in 1896 with fewer than 400 registered voters, and it has been making up for lost time ever since. The Art Deco Historic District in South Beach -- roughly 800 preserved buildings from the 1920s and 40s concentrated along and around Ocean Drive and Collins Avenue -- is the largest collection of Art Deco architecture in the world, all pastel facades, porthole windows, and neon signs that improve significantly after dark. What happened here at the design level in the 1930s was not a single architect's vision but a collective fever: dozens of local architects competed to make the most theatrical buildings on a strip of land surrounded by water and perpetual sun.

The Cuban revolution changed Miami permanently.

The exodus after 1959 created Little Havana, where Calle Ocho (SW 8th Street) still functions as its own social institution, and where the Versailles Restaurant at number 3555 has been operating since 1971 as an unofficial gathering point for the Cuban-American community. Wynwood, a former warehouse and garment district north of downtown, became in the 2010s the canvas for the Wynwood Walls, an outdoor mural installation that grew into something genuinely extraordinary. The Design District adjacent to it has made Miami a credible address for contemporary art alongside New York. The water -- Biscayne Bay to the east, the Everglades pressing from the west -- is everywhere, and the city's relationship with it is complicated by the knowledge that nearly all of it sits barely above sea level in a warming ocean.