Day 3

Our dinner venue last evening was a true American diner, taken apart, shipped from Pennsylvania and reassembled here in Miami Beach. Old diners don’t die, they go to Florida! 

On the recommendation of the New York Times, I ordered the Southern Fried Chicken but I was disappointed! I trust, as the Remain side of Brexit do, that it was not chlorinated chicken!!

On leaving the diner, we noticed the impressive Police and Courts facility. 

Afterwards, we took a stroll down Ocean Drive to see the Art Deco buidings in their evening dress

The Drive was awash with people enjoying the New Year week-end. 

Today we commenced the morning by taking a tour organized by the Miami Design Preservation league, an organization set up in 1979 to protect the c.1,000 historic Art Deco buidings in the one square mile beach area. 

Miami Beach reached its hey day in the 1920s and 1930s as a playground for the rich and famous. The city did not welcome Alcapone in the winter of 1928!!

When the Americans joined WW11, the city’s hotels were used as barracks to train the soldiers before they departed for Europe. 

After the war, the Beach became a centre for the Mafia in the 1950s. 

In the 1960s, 70s and 80s, the hotels in South  Beach fell into disrepair and were converted to condominiums for the poor and elderly. Today, as one observed all the rejuvenated Art Deco, Mediterranean and MiMo hotels, it is hard to reconcile that their porches were once occupied by the old, sitting in rocking chairs or the poor with their lines of washing hanging from clothes lines flung out to the nearest tree! 

In 1980 Andy Warhol, the pop artist painter visited the area and put it on the map. 

In the 1990s, it was a retreat for the gay population at the height of the HIV outbreak. They came to Miami Beach to live it up, as they expected that death was imminent! In 1992 Versace bought a mansion on Ocean Drive and the rich and famous visited here, including Elton John and Princess Diana.  

Eyes are raised when he demolished an Art Deco Hotel next door. In 1997, he was assassinated on the steps of that mansion. The mansion is now the hotel Villa Casuarina and if this is your wont, you may stay here and experience the site where not only the famous designer lived and died but where a film of the assassination was made!!

It was not until c 2,000 that the area became an attractive holiday destination. 

Our tour guide, a volunteer with the League, gave us an excellent, informative tour and took us inside the hotels to admire the Art Deco features. 

We were taken onto roof tops, where in the heddy days of the 1920s and 30s, they danced the night away. 

At the conclusion of the tour, we adjourned to a nearby restaurant for a healthy, Green breakfast - note the portion!!

We are now about to spend the afternoon in Little Havana, in Miami proper. 

More tomorrow..... or when I get internet connection again. We board the Silhouette tomorrow afternoon and set sail for the Caribbean - first port of call San Juan, Puerto Rico.