South Beach Art Deco Walk

Welcome to the Miami Beach Architectural District, known to most people as the Art Deco District. It became a U.S. historic district on May 14, 1979, and it holds 960 historic buildings, the largest collection of Art Deco architecture in the world. Art Deco here is an umbrella term. It covers styles like Streamline, Tropical and Med-deco, built mostly between the Great Depression and the early 1940s.

The style arrived after a double blow: Miami's real estate market slumped in 1925, and the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 left 25,000 people homeless across the region. Before that, Miami Beach mostly built in the Mediterranean Revival style, and many of those 1920s buildings survive too. The district runs from the ocean west to Alton Road and from Sixth Street north to Dade Boulevard. The hotels on Ocean Drive that actually face the sea run from 5th to 15th Streets, looking across Lummus Park and the beach.

This is Casa Casuarina, better known as the Versace Mansion. It was built in 1930 in the Mediterranean Revival style for Alden Freeman, a philanthropist and heir to a Standard Oil fortune. Freeman said it was modeled on the Alcázar de Colón in the Dominican Republic, and a block from that building sits to the right of the main entrance. About 100 medallions of political figures, including Julius Caesar, are set into its walls.

After Freeman died here in 1937, it became a 24-unit apartment building called the Amsterdam Palace. By the early 1980s it was run down. Gianni Versace bought it for 2.95 million dollars in 1992, restored its original name and made it a private home again. He bought the hotel next door to the south and tore it down for a pool and garden.

On July 15, 1997, Versace was shot and killed in front of the house by Andrew Cunanan. Since 2015 it has operated as a boutique hotel.