Miami

01 March 2024

The inter-coastal island of Miami Beach stretches 28 miles north from the famous Art Deco buildings of South Beach. After being spruced up for the Miami Vice TV series in the 1980’s as a backdrop for Don Johnson to mince around in linen suits and T-shirts badly in need of an iron, they have become the city's best-known symbol.

But this journey - my journey - starts at the other end of Miami Beach at Sunny Isles. While the name sounds like it was lifted from an Enid Blyton children’s novel, the reality could not be more remote. If the late Tom Wolfe’s chronicling of the locale in his final novel, ‘Back to Blood’ is remotely accurate, it is an almost entirely Russian-owned uber-ghetto, funded by fortunes of variegated provenance, few of which would bear much scrutiny.

Comprising upwards of thirty absurdly grand apartment blocks, each has about thirty floors with thirty or so dwellings on each floor. A quick look at a local property-porn website suggests each has a value north of $4 million. So that’s $100 billion for starters if the threatened sequestration of Russian-owned, internationally-located assets to fund the Ukrainians’ self-defence ever becomes a reality.

In common with Los Angeles and unlike New York and San Francisco, Miami lacks a defining skyline image. No Statue of Liberty or Golden Gate Bridge. No Empire State Building or TransAmerica Pyramid. But what it does have is scale. Approached downtown from I-95 that runs the length of Florida, anonymous, colossal monoliths dominate the skyline with the gaps between them featuring spindly cranes, promising more of the same.

While New York is starting to feel charmingly last century, Miami has surpassed it for relevance on many levels and is very much the here and now. The very best vantage point to be had is sipping a Pisco Sour outside at ‘La Mar’, Gastón Acurio’s Peruvian restaurant in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel on Claughton Island, gazing across up at the jewelled, downtown skyline of Brickell.

All around, blank but beautiful, Cuban & Puerto Rican woman shimmy, clad in scraps of silk, squired by grim-looking men with big watches. In the background, a Latin electro-musak soundtrack throbs suggestively.

Next morning, it’s a quick look at a couple of other locations vividly described by Wolfe. First, Hialea, the neighbourhood favoured by aspiring Cubans where Wolfe’s cattily notes the boats on trailers outside the modest single-storey dwelling are often higher than houses themselves and then the art deco, former Pan-American Airways seaplane terminal in Coconut Grove that has been lovingly restored as City Hall. Route 1 then threads its way out of the Miami suburbs where it becomes the Overseas Highway.