George Voronovsky in Miami Beach: A Guide to the City in the Footsteps of an Artist
Kyle Mancuso, Curatorial Research Associate, explores Miami through the eyes of George Voronovsky.
This past March, The New York Times published its weekly installment of the travel series “36 Hours” — a guide for what to do, what to eat, and where to stay for destinations around the world — about Miami and Miami Beach. “Designed to give you the best of the area’s new and old,” the article suggests an itinerary from Friday afternoon to Sunday lunch aimed at the adventurous and trendy traveler with plenty of money to throw around.
Ukrainian-born self-taught artist George Voronovsky (1903–1982) — the subject of a current monographic exhibition at the High — lived in Miami Beach from 1972 until his death in 1982. Though he probably did not have the chance to sip $14 cocktails on a boutique hotel rooftop or attend an immersive art exhibition, Voronovsky would have recognized several of the stops on the Times’ tour. The piece opens with a large photograph of Miami Beach’s Ocean Drive, site of the Colony Hotel where Voronovsky lived; suggests after-dinner drinks at Books & Books in Coral Gables, which opened just months before his death and where his art was shown for the first time in 1986; and recommends short-term rentals near Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, a favorite spot after he started visiting Miami in the 1950s and 1960s.
Miami, though, has undergone more than one transformation since Voronovsky’s final — and extremely prolific — decade. When Voronovsky moved to South Florida, Eastern European immigrants of his generation — many of them Jewish, though Voronovsky was Christian Orthodox — had already made Miami Beach into a “Little Jerusalem,” the businesses and institutions of the island catering to the community. Judaica shops lined the streets, local movie theaters showed movies in Russian, and the storied Wolfie’s restaurant offered gefulte fish platters, cold borscht, and babka. By the time Voronovsky died in 1982, that world was quickly vanishing, as shifts in demographics and culture ushered in the latest era of America’s Playground, immortalized and romanticized in the hit television series Miami Vice.
By uncovering the cities of Miami and Miami Beach as they were in the 1970s and early 1980s, we can learn more about how Voronovsky’s environment affected his life and his art practice. In this period, he found in Miami Beach both the familiar and the novel, as Old World memories persisted against the backdrop of a washed-up American tourist haven — an ideal environment in which to create his memoryscapes, paintings and sculptures fashioned from the detritus of South Beach that harked back to the joys of a half-century spent in Eastern Europe. Although Voronovsky had created art from at least the time he lived in Philadelphia — and probably long before — it was Miami Beach that made him into an artist.
What follows is an illustrated guide to Miami Beach (and a little bit of Miami) as Voronovsky knew it, organized around the places he would have shopped, visited, and painted.[1]
Colony Hotel
Any exploration of Voronovsky’s Miami Beach must begin with the Colony Hotel, where he moved in 1972. From the third floor — his unit, room 418, occupied both sides of the marquee — he had a commanding view of Ocean Drive, Lummus Park, and the beach beyond, dotted by palm trees, screw pines, and tiki huts where the many Eastern European immigrants who called South Beach home congregated. Voronovsky didn’t miss the opportunity to paint the view from the window (fig. 1).
The view outside was not the only one worth seeing, however. In his small room, he created a colorful escape from his past by converting his living space into an artist-built environment, filling it to the brim with paintings and sculptures that evoked his rose-colored remembrances of his past life in Ukraine (fig. 2).
The Colony Hotel (fig. 3), which is still around, was built in 1935 by Henry Hohauser (1895–1963), one of the most influential architects of the period working in Miami Beach. The building is a prime example of the Art Deco and Streamline styles in vogue during the post-Depression South Florida building boom, when the once-ubiquitous Mediterranean Revival increasingly gave way to a more international, modernist architecture.[2] With windows that wrap around the corner, eyebrow overhangs that demarcate the building’s three floors, and a soaring vertical fin bearing the hotel’s name — a theatrical flourish borrowed from movie houses of the period — the Colony was immediately recognized as a success and became an enduring symbol of the new South Beach Deco style.[3] Fitting into a row with other squat, economical hotels along the beachfront Ocean Drive, the Colony advertised comfortable accommodations and an unbeatable view for the middle-class tourist looking for a place in the sun.
Though South Beach was a hot spot before and after the Second World War, by the time Voronovsky moved into the Colony in 1972, times had changed. That same year, both the Democratic and Republican national conventions came to town during a contentious time for the nation, leading to highly publicized protests and arrests that tarnished the image of Miami Beach as America’s Playground. Investments dried up, and the hotels that lined Ocean Drive were increasingly forced to fill their rooms not with tourists but with aging Eastern European immigrants who had discovered in postwar South Florida a retirement resort. Rooms originally designed for a weekend stay were converted — with the addition of kitchenettes — into efficiency apartments with year-long leases for seniors on fixed income. By the end of the decade, some hotels averaged up to seventy percent long-term renters throughout the year, many of whom lived alone and hovered around the poverty line.[4]
With an unspecified checkout date, Voronovsky turned the cramped space of his room at the Colony Hotel into a “defiant oasis of color and light,” filling every inch of the white-washed walls with cardboard paintings, Styrofoam sculptures, and flowers cut from soup and soda cans (fig. 4).[5] Using items discarded along the beach as his materials — he carved birds from washed-up surfboards and painted a woodland scene on a Pizza Hut box — he produced work that evoked a fondly remembered (and highly fantastical) “pre-revolutionary Russian Eden”: a traveling Russian circus, a summer festival, fertile fields dotted by bales of hay (fig. 5).[6] Pinning these creations onto the wall with thumb tacks, he created a space that transcended a traditional artist’s studio, collapsing his living and working spaces into a single paradisaical environment for healing and remembering. His decorations, which glinted from the sidewalk along the beach (fig. 3, look closely at those third-floor windows), made room 418 into a room with a view, both inside and out. It was that view from below that captured the attention of Miami Beach–based photographer Gary Monroe, who would befriend Voronovsky and later inherit the artist’s work and carry on his legacy.
While Voronovsky lived and worked from the Colony, plans were being made to redesign South Beach, clearing the strip of its Art Deco elegance and replacing it with high-rise condos. By the second half the decade, as redevelopment of the area below Sixth Street gained the support of city officials, the demolition of buildings just to the north — including the Colony — and Voronovsky’s subsequent displacement looked all the more possible. However, a few plucky citizens, who were very much opposed to the planned elimination of the island’s architectural monuments, mobilized to save the neighborhood.[7]
Led by pioneering preservationist Barbara Capitman (1920–1990) and comprising a motley crew of artists, designers, and drifters — among them Leicester Hemingway (1915–1982), brother of author Ernest Hemingway and a writer in his own right — the rapidly assembled Miami Design Preservation League (MDPL) organized walking tours, gathered signatures, and published guidebooks that catalogued the often-unnoticed Art Deco treasures of the South Beach area. After a few years of tense city council meetings and showdowns with developers, the group secured a spot for the Art Deco District on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. The area was the first such appointed district in the nation to comprise twentieth-century buildings, numbering over four hundred, and it still boasts the highest concentration of Art Deco structures in the world. This almost unmitigated success — a few buildings, the New Yorker hotel most famously, were demolished following the nomination — made South Beach a mecca for architectural enthusiasts, saving the neighborhood’s iconic structures and preserving its inimitable character.
However, with the promise of trendy tourists and big profits came the demise of Miami Beach as a “Shtetl in the Sun” — a haven for immigrant seniors (and artists) like Voronovsky who had benefited from a decade’s-long downturn in the city’s fortunes. While the MDPL cautioned against the dislodging of these pensioners, its plans for the city’s redevelopment imagined Miami Beach as a tourist town and Ocean Drive as an architectural “theme resort,” with facilities that catered to short-term visitors rather than long-term renters.[8] Living alone and with his health failing, Voronovsky, like so many others, found it more comfortable to move to low-cost, senior-living facilities outside the Art Deco District. The paradise he had built for himself at the Colony had to be dismantled, but with the permission of his new landlords, the Housing Authority of the City of Miami Beach, he was allowed to reconstitute his artist-built environment in his new lodgings.
The Oceanfront Hotels
Well before he moved into the Colony in 1972, Voronovsky had started to explore Miami Beach as a vacationer. In the mid-1950s, while living in Philadelphia, he traveled up and down the Eastern Seaboard, making it all the way to South Florida, where he found a balmy climate and lots of people who spoke the same language, ate the same food, and remembered the same old days that he did. As a railroad worker, he did not have the means to stay at the swankier hotels farther north along Collins Avenue — where you might find Sinatra or Elvis — but he could afford the more modest hotels on South Beach, where these like-minded immigrants also stayed. His address book from the period — half in Russian, half in English — is full of the names of hotels in the area: the Avalon, Traymore, Normandy, Park Central, Starlite.
In one photograph from around 1958 (fig. 6), Voronovsky poses in front of the Savoy Plaza, one in a row of hotels just south of Lummus Park that were situated “directly on the beach,” as promotional materials were keen to point out. Because of a 1933 zoning law that allowed buildings in the area to be erected close together — typically ten to twenty feet apart — tourists were packed in along the oceanfront, forcing a certain sociability to beach life (fig. 7).[9] Voronovsky doubtless forged relationships this way, and his address books are filled with names of Russian speakers he met. One Sam Jaffe, staying at The White House hotel, scrawled his name and room number in English on the hotel’s stationery, information that Voronovsky duly translated into Russian (fig. 8).
While these photographs from the 1950s and 1960s show a gay and sociable Voronovsky, they also reveal — through conspicuous absences — a darker side of South Beach history. In the early twentieth century, Miami Beach was divided among a handful of wealthy landowners who imagined the island as an exclusive resort destination for White, Gentile, upper-middle-class families, denying Catholics, Jews, and people of color basic housing rights and access to public spaces. For a time, Jews were restricted to the area south of 5th Street, and although many Jews designed, built, owned, and operated the beachfront hotels, they were legally barred from staying in them until 1949.[10]
The influence of Jim Crow laws meant the treatment of the Black community was especially severe. Miami was home to a thriving Black community by the early twentieth century, with many living in a neighborhood called Colored Town (later referred to as Overtown) that became a center for Black society in South Florida. Miami Beach, however, was an altogether different story. Although many Black people worked in Miami Beach throughout the segregation era, they were not allowed to stay overnight, and public-access beaches were not integrated until the 1960s. A Black maid who worked in Miami Beach in the 1930s and 1940s recalled needing to carry an ID with her picture and fingerprints just to set foot on the island. Entertainers like Sammy Davis Jr. and Aretha Franklin, after performing at the famous Fontainebleau hotel, were forced to commute back across the bay, where they often performed late-night shows at clubs that became hotspots for Black life.[11] The Hampton House, a hotel in Overtown, was one of the centers of this cultural scene: Martin Luther King Jr. rehearsed his “I Have a Dream Speech” there; Cab Calloway stopped by, as did Malcom X, Jim Brown, Sam Cooke, and Muhammed Ali, their meeting immortalized in the film One Night in Miami… (2020).[12]
Despite these pockets of flourishing social, cultural, and coastal life — a Black-only beach eventually opened at Virginia Key in 1945 — Black tourists of the 1950s and 1960s would have had a very different experience than Voronovsky did. Even while the island was home for many Jews and Eastern European immigrants who had been displaced during World War II, it remained off limits to Americans who had lived for decades just across the bay — a reminder that personal histories of travel around the United States could be radically, and racially, divergent.
Lincoln Road Mall: Burdine’s, Woolworth’s, and the Colony Theatre
One of the few images Voronovsky made of Miami Beach is a painting of the famous Lincoln Road Mall, looking east toward the hotels that line Collins Avenue while planes, helicopters, and the once-ubiquitous Goodyear blimp circle above the beach beyond (fig. 9). Through his style — birds and animals roam freely, trees and shoppers dwarf buildings — the very real mall is transformed into a semi-fantastical cityscape.
Developed in the 1910s, Lincoln Road served as both a crucial east-west thoroughfare for the island and as the city’s premier shopping destination — Saks and Bonwit Teller opened stores along the stretch — lending credence to the street’s self-appointed nickname, the “Fifth Avenue of the South.” Its heyday from the 1920s to the 1940s was followed by an economic (and marketing) downturn as Chicago crime boss Al Capone — among other underworld types — maintained offices along the road’s south side, deterring investors and shoppers alike. By the late 1950s, the city of Miami Beach was looking to redesign the area and turned to architect and urban planner Morris Lapidus (1902–2001), whose Fontainebleau (1954) and Eden Roc (1955) hotels had made him the father of the “Miami Modern” style. (Like so many of Voronovsky’s Miami Beach contemporaries, Lapidus was Jewish and of Russo-Ukrainian origin, born in Odessa and forced to flee Russian pogroms.) Drawing inspiration from the futuristic World’s Fairs of the twentieth century and the latest theories in urban retail spaces, Lapidus proposed to redesign Lincoln Road as an “auto-less mall,” complete with exotic plantings, modernist follies, and electrically powered (though painfully slow) shuttles.[13] On November 27, 1960, a little over a year after he presented the initial concept, the newly christened Lincoln Road Mall — stretching from Collins Avenue to Alton Road — opened to great fanfare and rave reviews.
Voronovsky’s painting captures the essential elements of the mall as it was: the shuttle, the fountain, the striped awnings (fig. 10). While certainly not a realistic record of place, his Lincoln Road buzzes with the busyness of a bazaar — a cyclist dashes across the street ahead of an oncoming tram car as umbrella-toting window shoppers leisurely make their way up and down the road — condensing onto a small canvas the hectic realities of the modernist shopping dream: efficient movement in all directions, all at once, all the time. Even if Voronovsky’s painting is not an en plein air view — it is as much a memoryscape as his memory paintings of Ukraine — it reveals a knowledge of the mall that he could only have gained from going there. While Lincoln Road may once have been the retail destination for the elite, by the 1970s it was much more democratic, with shops to fit a variety of budgets. Voronovsky, then, would not only have painted the mall but would also have shopped there.
Burdine’s
Established in the 1890s as a dry goods store, Burdine’s grew into the quintessential Florida department store of the twentieth century, with shops across the state selling the world’s top brands and the chain’s own “Sunshine Fashions,” clothes designed for Florida’s hot and humid weather. Burdine’s first Miami Beach shop was located inside the Roney Plaza Hotel, followed by a larger standalone store at Lincoln Road and Meridian Avenue, designed in 1936 by local architect Robert Law Weed (1897–1961).[14] The chain quickly outgrew its road-facing footprint, however, and less than twenty years later, Weed was asked to produce a second Lincoln Road area location at Meridian and 17th street, which opened in late 1953 and boasted ninety-six thousand square feet (fig. 11).[15] The store was a staple of the new pedestrian mall as the brand continued to expand from South Florida all the way to the Panhandle. By the late 1970s, when Voronovsky was in the market for some “Sunshine Fashions” of his own, Burdine’s was earning $310 million in sales annually.[16]
Of course, Voronovsky had lived most of his life in not-so-tropical environs, and he would have needed to update his wardrobe; by all accounts he did, as snapshots of the artist in his room from the 1970s and 1980s show him sporting brightly colored Hawaiian shirts. Like at any good department store, clothes from Burdine’s came packaged in branded cardboard boxes, their material and dimensions ideal for Voronovsky’s repurposed canvases. He used one such Burdine’s box as a backing for an idyllic forest scene of grazing deer set against a blazing red sun (fig. 12), a motif through his work that recalls the ubiquitous sun-forms in Ukrainian folk art. The “Sunshine Fashions” printed in cursive typescript on the reverse takes on a whole new meaning.
F.W. Woolworth
Armed with clothes and a canvas, Voronovsky still needed materials to paint with. For these he went to Woolworth’s, the country’s first five-and-dime stores that sold everything from tape recorders and mini bikes to mini dresses and typewriters. The Lincoln Road Woolworth’s opened in 1940/41 on the ground floor of the Mercantile National Bank Building, designed in the International style by Albert Anis (1889–1964) and marketed as “the most distinguished business address in Miami Beach” (fig. 13).[17]
Though they were not of the highest quality, the paints at Woolworth’s were cheap, easy to use, and most of all, very, very bright. These saturated colors were a boon to Voronovsky, as his palette reflected the vibrant colors favored in Ukrainian folk art. With these paints, he transformed his Ukrainian past (fig. 12) and Miami present (fig. 14) into vivid meditations on movement, whether animal migration or mechanized commute.
Woolworth’s did a little bit of everything and was also where Voronovsky traveled to have his photographs processed (fig. 15). He took many photos over the years, and on occasion, received film of his family members living in Prague. Going to Woolworth’s, then, was a one-stop shop for an immigrant and artist on a budget, an opportunity to develop memories on both photo paper and canvas board.
Colony Theatre
There was more to do than just shop at the mall. You could also catch a movie at one of the many theaters lining Lincoln Road — most of them would sadly close by the end of the 1970s — and Voronovsky’s cinema of choice was the Colony (no relation to the hotel).[18] The Colony Theatre, with exquisite interior tile work that supposedly replicated the designs of Radio City Music Hall, opened in January 1935 to great fanfare and showed the latest Hollywood movies.[19] Just a few years later, the Second World War broke out, and Miami Beach was converted into a military staging ground. During this period, the Colony screened training videos and newsreels for troops awaiting their orders (fig. 16). After the war, it was turned back into a movie theater, and with the establishment of the pedestrian mall in 1960, the grand entrance was moved from just under the signature marquee to the corner of Lincoln Road and Lenox Avenue (fig. 17).
In 1971, Samuel Kipnis (died 1982) — a self-made millionaire in the box business — purchased the Colony, converting it into a cultural center that showed selections of his vast collection of Old World movies and filmed performances of operas, ballets, and symphonies. By showing Russian-language movies from the previous two decades that were largely devoid of violence, sex, or Cold War politics, Kipnis — an immigrant himself who fled his native Russia as a young adult — offered Miami Beach’s aging Eastern European community the opportunity to indulge in, for just 50 cents a ticket (later increased to 75), the landscapes, languages, and histories that characterized the territories they had grown up in but had been forced to abandon.[20] A sample of the movie listings from the period gives an idea of the nostalgia for sale: Springtime of the Volga (1961), Serf Actress (1963), Cossacks Cry Too (1963), Panorama of Russia, and Ulanova Dances at the Bolshoi, to name a few. The film Train Goes to Kiev (1961) and a recording of the 1970 Tchaikovsky Music Festival were perennial favorites, with showings throughout the decade.
In the case of Fate of a Man (1959), a film that Gary Monroe went to see with Voronovsky in 1980, nostalgia may have slipped into biography. Through a series of flashbacks, the movie tells the story of Andrei Sokolov, a provincial Russian who is drafted into the Red Army at the outbreak of World War II, taken prisoner by the Nazis, and subsequently transferred to a labor camp, becoming separated from his family, all of whom will perish in the war. Eventually, he begins a new life when he informally adopts a listless young boy in search of his own missing kin. This Soviet “everyman,” — Sokolov, we learn, was born in 1900 — could just as well have been Voronovsky, whose sufferings and life trajectory were so similar. Even the structure of the movie has its parallels with Voronovsky’s art practice. The film’s early flashbacks, underscored by blurring effects, function as a cinematic equivalent of the artist’s memoryscapes, evoking prewar joys and freedoms glimpsed through the wistful eyes of a grizzled veteran.
For Voronovsky, and for many of his immigrant neighbors, moving to South Beach didn’t necessarily mean moving on. He may have eaten Pizza Hut and drank Coca-Cola, but the Colony Theatre provided him with a window to a lost world, conjured up in ninety-minute increments and consumed from the plush, air-conditioned environs of the cinema.
Rex Art Supplies
In the late 1970s, with the help of Gary Monroe, Voronovsky applied for and received a grant from the Florida Arts Council that enabled him to purchase better-quality paints and stretched canvases. For that, he had to leave the island of Miami Beach and head to Rex Art Supplies in Coral Gables — the address was recorded on the first page of Voronovsky’s address book (fig. 18) — a shop for Miami-area artists that dates back to 1950 and is still in operation. For the first time, Voronovsky could make use of materials designed with the artist — and not the fast-food consumer or beachside tourist — in mind. “He was like a kid in a candy shop,” remembers Monroe, who accompanied Voronovsky on a trip there.
With these better materials, Voronovsky was able to achieve his vision of harmonious pandemonium in works like Untitled (Dancers and Cheerleaders II), which through dizzying symmetry incorporates both the folk dances of his Ukrainian past and the cheerleaders of his Miami present (fig. 19). This higher-quality pigment — which did not need to be diluted to last longer, as his previous paint had — allowed him to evenly apply the paint to delineate forms more clearly. Details like the leaves on the trees and the strands of the pom poms could be rendered precisely and without bleeding into the background, giving the work a polished, professional quality. Though they lack the craft qualities of his cardboard paintings, his finished canvases are evidence of his talent for composing organized chaos and complex worlds out of basic building blocks.
Rebecca Towers and the Port of Miami
In the last years of his life, after moving out of the Colony, Voronovsky lived in Rebecca Towers, a low-income, senior-living development on the bay side of Miami Beach (fig. 20). Comprising south and north buildings — erected in 1975 and 1979, respectively — each with thirteen floors and some two hundred units, Rebecca Towers was an affordable option for many, like Voronovsky, on fixed incomes and in need of some Old World companionship. Apart from the usual social interactions that might take place in the lobby or outdoor garden plots — Voronovsky, a trained musician, would sometimes play the piano in the social hall — the Towers offered classes through the Torah Academy for Adult Jews with lessons in Hebrew, Hasidic philosophy, and the history of Eastern European Jewry. A homebound work program for seniors organized by the Jewish Community Centers of South Florida put residents back to work filling children’s goody bags with Disney World merchandise — Voronovsky held on to a business card from one of the Centers’ employees.[21] Such engagement with neighbors of his generation and with community leaders hoping to improve senior life through learning and labor would have been both a source of stimulation and a journey down memory lane.
Riding the wave of the Miami Beach high-rise boom of the 1960s — which, in addition to high-density luxury apartments, also produced several examples of elderly housing — Rebecca Towers boasted “a commanding view of ships at sea” with sightlines of the Port of Miami.[22] From that unique vantage point, Voronovsky, who filled his paintings with seascapes and chugging boats (fig. 21), could watch (and photograph) the ships as they passed by Fisher Island — with its signature oil tanks — on their way out to the Atlantic (fig. 22).
Neither could he escape the temptation to go aboard the ships. During his visits to Miami Beach from Philadelphia in the 1950s and 1960s, Voronovsky took to exploring his tropical surroundings. On one occasion, he took a trip on a boat run by Nikko Gold Coast Cruises, a tour company that offered sightseeing trips to the Everglades, Millionaires Row, the Florida Keys, Seaquarium, and Vizcaya, among other destinations. A souvenir photograph from the trip shows Voronovsky grinning at the camera, pipe dangling from his mouth (fig. 23). Dressed in an oversized t-shirt and dark slacks, he was yet to sort out what to wear while in the tropics.
After he befriended Gary and Teresa Monroe in the late 1970s, Voronovsky — by this time armed with a webbed folding lawn chair, shorts, and sandals — often visited the cruise ships docked in the bay (fig. 24). Though it is not the case now, it was possible then to explore cruise ships without a ticket, so long as you jumped ship before it set sail. Judging from his delight at wandering the deck, Voronovsky was probably one of the last to step ashore.
Miami Beach was a second paradise for Voronovsky, a New World equivalent to the happily remembered seascapes of his youth. His move to South Florida did not entail the erasure of his past. On the contrary, his experience in Miami Beach brought him into contact with the people and culture of his homeland, as the island was a resort designed for (and by) his Old World compatriots. On the beach, he spent time with Russian speakers living in nearby hotels; at the movies, he watched Soviet film stars dance across Ukrainian landscapes; and from his room, he wrote letters to family members in Prague and friends in Philadelphia.
In one such letter, dated March 3, 1976, and addressed to his union representative in Pennsylvania (fig. 25), Voronovsky recalls his recent bouts with ill health. “In June 1975 by me was big operation,” he wrote, “but still I do to live and do to enjoy the life and beautiful Miami Beach.” In the 1970s, when the rest of the nation had moved on from America’s Playground, Voronovsky’s words were as good an endorsement as any.
[1] For sharing their memories and knowledge of Miami Beach past and present, I wish to thank Gary Monroe, Teresa Monroe, Carmel Gurucharri, Oleg Jakubowicz, Megan Cerchiai, and Linda Burton.
[2] Allan T. Shulman, “Building and Rebuilding: The Making of Miami Beach,” in The Making of Miami Beach, 1933–1942: The Architecture of Lawrence Murray Dixon, ed. Allan T. Shulman and Jean-François Lejeune (Miami Beach: Bass Museum of Art, 2000), 8–39.
[3] Allan T. Shulman, “Miami Beach Between World’s Fairs: The Visual Culture of a Modern City,” in The Making of Miami Beach, 40–72.
[4] Miami Beach Art Deco District Preservation and Development Plan: January 1981 (Boston: Anderson Notter Finegold Inc., 1981), 13–20.
[5] Michael McLeod, “Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man,” The Orlando Sentinel, February 1, 1987.
[6] Nick Bozanic, “FSU gallery’s assembled Florida eccentrics aren’t,” Florida Flambeau, October 12, 1987, 7.
[7] See M. Barron Stofik, Saving South Beach (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005).
[8] Miami Beach Art Deco District Preservation and Development Plan, 32.
[9] Allan T. Shulman, “Building and Rebuilding: The Making of Miami Beach,” in The Making of Miami Beach, 35.
[10] Marilys R. Nepomechie, Building Paradise: An Architectural Guide to the Magic City (Miami: AIA Miami, 2010), 115.
[11] Marvin Dunn, Black Miami in the Twentieth Century (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997), 171.
[12] Kathy Hersh, “High Cotton: Jazzing it Up at the Hampton House,” in Miami Modern Metropolis: Paradise and Paradox in Midcentury Architecture and Planning, ed. Allan T. Shulman (Miami Beach: Bass Museum of Art, 2009), 334–337.
[13] Allan T. Shulman, “Malling Lincoln Road,” in Miami Modern Metropolis, 232–239.
[14] “Burdine Shop Work of Miami Architect,” The Miami Herald, January 12, 1936.
[15] “Burdine’s Opening Part of New Store,” The Miami Herald, November 15, 1953, 1C; Milt Sosin, “Burdine’s Play Host at Beach with ‘Preview’ of New Store,” The Miami News, January 6, 1954, 9B; “Burdine’s to Preview Beach Store,” The Miami Herald, January 6, 1954, 4B.
[16] Larry Birger, “Burdines on the move: ‘We see no end,’” The Miami News, August 24, 1979, 1; “Retailing in Florida’s best tradition,” The Miami Herald, September 8, 1980, 5P; “We miss you, Burdine’s. Here’s a look back at our love affair with the Florida store,” The Miami Herald, October 4, 2019.
[17] “Chain to Put 5 and 10 on Lincoln Road: 25-Year Lease Made by Woolworths in New Beach Building,” The Miami Herald, June 28, 1940, 4B.
[18] Mitch Lubitz, “Beach accepts Colony Theater as gift,” The Miami News, March 5, 1981, 1MB–2MB.
[19] “New Theater Marks Major Step in Renewed Building Activity of Metropolitan Miami Area,” The Miami Herald, December 2, 1934, 1; “Grand Opening Colony Theater Here Tonight,” Miami Beach Tribune, January 25, 1935, 12; “Colony Theater Filled by Opening Night Crowd,” Miami Beach Tribune, January 16, 1935, 3.
[20] Paul Levine, “Samuel Kipnis & His Magic Lantern Show,” The Miami Herald, August 16, 1970, 10–11; Leonard Sloane, “Corrugated-Box Business Makes 86-Year-Old Run,” The New York Times, November 24, 1973, 43; John Huddy, “Sam Kipnis: From Russia With Love,” The Miami Herald, October 4, 1975, 44; “Ex-owner of Dupont Kipnis, 96,” The Miami Herald, October 1, 1982, 4C.
[21] Norma A. Orovitz, “Rekindling lights of faith,” The Miami News, December 18, 1981, 1B–2B; Eleanor Hart, “Homebound Job Pays Bonus in Seniors’ Self-Esteem,” The Miami Herald, July 9, 1978.
[22] See Paul S. George, “Robert King High Towers: The Tall Face of Public Housing,” in Miami Modern Metropolis, 282–287; Allan T. Shulman, “Suburbs on Edge: Residential Palisades and Concrete Canyons,” in Miami Modern Metropolis, 294–303. Mark Silva, “When it rains, it pours inside Rebecca Towers,” The Miami Herald, January 17, 1980.
