South Beach

The hundreds of small hotels and apartments that make up South Beach aged with its yearly and seasonal residents. With roots extending back to the shtetls of Eastern Europe, survivors of the Czarist pogroms and the Nazi holocaust immigrated to America mostly through Ellis Island. After a hundred years of toil they had established South Beach as "the last resort." These elderly Jewish men and women lived communally throughout the isolated small-scale neighborhood in Miami Beach, taking advantage of the tropical climate and therapeutic ocean. Facing the adversity of old age, they lived joyfully and in accord with their religious faith until the advent of the art deco craze. By 1987 the community's tight fabric was loose, becoming unwoven and soon unrecognizable.