Hello and welcome! I'm Sylvia. I'm 63, I moved to Miami Beach from New Jersey in 1991 when my husband retired, and within a year I'd fallen so hard for the old hotels on Ocean Drive that I signed up to be a volunteer guide with the local preservation group. I've been leading walking tours on weekend mornings ever since, in a hat, with a water bottle, pointing at eyebrows. (The architectural kind. I'll explain.)

People on my tours keep asking if there's something they can take home, so this page is my answer: a walk you can do yourself, what to look for, a little history, and my own favorite details, the ones I make everybody stop for. It's no substitute for a real tour with a real guide (I'm biased), but it'll get you started, and you can go at your own speed and stop for coffee whenever you like.

Miami Beach was a mangrove swamp and a coconut plantation a hundred years ago. It got dredged and filled and sold as a resort in the 1910s and '20s, and the first wave of building was in the fancy Mediterranean style: stucco, arches, red tile roofs, the look of a Spanish villa. Then came the hurricane of 1926 and the Depression, and a lot of the big money went away.

What came next is the part we love. Through the 1930s and into the early 1940s, the south end of the beach filled up with small hotels, three and four stories, built fast and cheap for middle-class tourists coming down on the train for a couple of weeks of sun. The architects, a handful of them who did dozens of buildings each, worked in the styles of the day: Art Deco, with its zigzags and sunbursts and stepped-up rooflines, and then the smoother Streamline Moderne, with rounded corners and horizontal lines that look like a ship or a locomotive going fast while standing still. Down here they mixed in tropical touches, flamingos and palm fronds and ocean waves, and the result is a look you won't find in this concentration anywhere else in the world. Some people call it Tropical Deco. I just call it ours.

By the 1970s these little hotels were run-down, full of retirees on fixed incomes, and developers wanted to knock them down for high-rises. In 1976 a small group of preservationists got organized to stop that, and in 1979 about a square mile of the south beach was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Miami Beach Architectural District, the first district of 20th-century buildings ever to be listed. That's the part I make people say back to me: the first. The pastel paint jobs you see now, the pinks and mint greens and lavenders, mostly date from the 1980s, when a designer proposed the palette and the owners went along; the original buildings were mostly white with a bit of trim. Some of the purists grumble. I think it's lovely and I don't care.

Once you know these, you'll see them on every block and you won't be able to stop. I'm sorry in advance.

This is roughly the loop I lead, minus my jokes. I'm not going to tell you which hotel is which; there are plaques and a guidebook for that, and part of the fun is discovering them yourself. I'll tell you where to walk and where to look.

1. Start at the south end of Ocean Drive, around 5th Street, on the park side. Lummus Park runs along the ocean beside the Drive for these blocks, and from the park you can see the hotels across the street all in a row, which is the best view of them. Stand under a palm and just look up the street. That's the postcard.
2. Walk north on the park side of Ocean Drive, slowly, to about 15th Street. This is the heart of it, block after block of small hotels, most of them from the mid-1930s to the early '40s. Every one is a little different. Play the game: find the eyebrows, find the portholes, count to three, look for the finial. Look at the porches and the terrazzo. Look at the neon signs, even unlit. Cross over whenever something catches your eye and go stand on the porch; the hotels are used to it.
3. Turn around at 15th and come back down Collins Avenue, one block in from the ocean. Collins is where you'll see more of the bigger, later Streamline hotels, with their curved corners and towers, some of them a whole block long. Look up: the best details are often on the top floor and the roofline.
4. Cut over to Washington Avenue, one more block in. Washington is the working street, with the shops and the post office and the everyday buildings, and some of the best Deco is here precisely because nobody has fussed with it. The post office is worth stepping inside for.
5. Finish at Española Way, a short street between Washington and Drexel around 14th and 15th, built in the 1920s to look like a Spanish village, with arcades and balconies and tile. It's the other Miami Beach, from before the Deco, and a good place to sit down with a coffee and feel your feet.
6. If you've got more in you, walk on up to Lincoln Road, a pedestrian street of shops and cafes a few blocks north, and then take the long way back down Ocean Drive at dusk for the neon. That's the whole day, and it's a good one.

• Go early. I mean it. 8 or 9 in the morning. The light is soft and comes from the side and makes every eyebrow and stripe throw a shadow, the sidewalks are empty, and it's fifteen degrees cooler than it will be at noon. By 11 the sun is straight overhead, the buildings go flat, and you'll be miserable.
• Bring water. A real bottle. Two in summer. There are cafes, but you'll want a sip on every block, not every six.
• The sun. A hat with a brim. Sunscreen before you leave, not when you notice. Sunglasses, though take them off to look at the colors, the pastels go gray behind dark lenses.
• Shoes you can stand in. You'll walk two miles and stand still for half of it.
• Look up, look down. The street level is all restaurants and menus and umbrellas. The architecture starts at the second floor and the terrazzo is under your feet.
• Go into the lobbies. Most hotels don't mind a polite visitor taking a peek at the floor and the front desk. Say good morning. Don't wander past the lobby.
• Come back at night. The neon. I said it already. I'll say it again.
• Bring a camera and a lot of film; the color print film that's on sale at the drugstore is fine. Every building wants its picture taken.

• A terrazzo sunburst on a front porch on Ocean Drive, pale yellow and cream and a bit of green, worn smooth by sixty years of sandy feet. I make the whole group stand on it.
• A flamingo etched into a glass front door, one leg up, seen from inside the lobby with the morning light coming through it.
• The way the eyebrows line up when you stand at one end of a block and sight down the facades: four or five buildings, and the ledges make a set of parallel lines running off toward the ocean like a drawing in perspective.
• A porthole window in a stairwell that somebody has, for decades, kept a little potted plant in. I don't know who. I've never seen them. I'd like to shake their hand.
• The corner of a Streamline hotel at dusk when the neon along the roofline comes on one tube at a time and the curve of the building lights up like a ship pulling out.
• Old people on the porches. Fewer every year. There was a time when every hotel porch on Ocean Drive was full of retirees in folding chairs from about 4 p.m. on, and I miss them, and when I find one now I say hello, and they always know more about the building than I do.

I lead walks for the preservation group on weekend mornings, and so do a dozen other volunteers who know more than I do. The schedule changes with the season, so I won't post it here and have it be wrong; e-mail me and I'll tell you what's on and where to meet. Wear the hat. Bring the water. I'll be the one pointing.

While you're on the beach: my neighbors Carlos and Yvette teach a free salsa lesson on Wednesday nights, and it is the most fun you'll have on Collins Avenue with your clothes on. And Captain Ray runs a sunset cruise that gives you the whole skyline from the water, which is the other way to see it. See also the SouthBeach neighborhood here on GeoCities.us, and, for another person who loves old buildings, the Millbrook Township Historical Society.