Our catalogue holds 287 hotel buildings in Miami Beach, and every single one carries a picture — a completeness we have nowhere else outside Europe. Then we dated the pictures. The median is 1945, 258 of the 287 were made before 1970, and two commercial postcard publishers account for two-thirds of them. This is not a photographic survey of Miami Beach. It is an advertising archive, and that is the only honest way to publish it.
Where these numbers come from. All 287 rows come from Wikidata, which catalogues buildings — including closed, demolished, converted and renamed ones. Each row carries a name, a coordinate pair, a city value of Miami Beach, and the filename of one image on Wikimedia Commons. That is the entire payload. The licence, author and date of every one of the 287 images were then read from the Wikimedia Commons API, file by file, on 17 August 2026 — not sampled. All figures below were queried the same day.
What a Miami Beach row actually contains
Nine rows carry a website, and the nine are a list in themselves: the Fontainebleau, the Eden Roc, the Delano, the National, the Shelborne, the Betsy, the Kimpton Surfcomber, the Iberostar Waves Berkeley Shore and Casa Faena. With one exception those are the large brand-operated hotels of the strip. It is tempting to read that field as a liveness signal — nine still trading, 278 gone. Do not read it that way. Wikidata records a website when an editor troubles to add one; its absence is an absence of editing, not an absence of a business. What the nine do show is which buildings attract enough commercial attention for someone to maintain their data.
The pictures are much older than the buildings
We read the date field for all 287 Commons files. Every one of them is dated, which is unusual and useful. The distribution is not what a modern catalogue looks like.
258 of the 287 images — 89.9% — predate 1970. Twenty-seven were made in 2000 or later. There is a thirty-year hole in the middle: not one image dated in the 1970s, and not one in the 1990s. The 1940s alone supply 120 pictures, four times what the last sixty years managed between them.
Two publishers made two-thirds of the archive
Grouping the 287 files by the author or publisher recorded on Commons gives an unusually concentrated answer. Curt Teich & Co. of Chicago accounts for 102 of the 287 images, and Colourpicture Publishers of Boston for 86 — 188 between them, 65.5% of the archive. Neither was a documentary photographer. Both were commercial postcard printers, and Curt Teich was the largest of them in the United States. A Teich card of a hotel exists because the hotel paid for it.
That shows in the pictures, and you see it the moment you scroll a page of them: the frontage centred, the sky retouched, the palms arranged, hardly a person anywhere. These are the images the hotels chose to publish about themselves. As evidence they are very good for a facade, a sign and a name, useless for anything behind the front door, and they flatter systematically. Reading them as a record of the district is reading an industry's own advertising as though it were a survey.
- 260 of the 287 images are in the public domain, overwhelmingly because American postcards of this period were published without a renewed copyright. They can be reproduced freely, which is why this article can show you one.
- 27 carry a Creative Commons licence — 17 CC BY-SA 4.0, five CC BY 4.0, two CC BY 2.0, one CC BY-SA 3.0, one CC BY-SA 2.0 and one CC0. Every one of those except the CC0 file requires the photographer to be credited wherever the picture appears. That is a licence condition, not a courtesy.
- Three files are TIFFs — among them the Cavalier and the Fairwind, both scanned from the Historic American Buildings Survey. No browser displays a TIFF, so those three rows have a picture in the data and a blank space on the screen.
Only 158 of the 287 stand in the Art Deco district
The obvious headline for this dataset is “287 Art Deco hotels”, and the coordinates say it is wrong. The Miami Beach Architectural District — the Art Deco district, on the National Register since 1979 — runs roughly from 5th Street to 23rd Street. Sorting our 287 rows by latitude puts 158 inside that band and 129 outside it, some as far north as 87th Street.
The whole set is a ribbon — about 14 km from end to end and 2.5 km wide, because Miami Beach is a barrier island and its hotels sit along two streets. The northern third is a different building stock altogether: the Fontainebleau and the Eden Roc, both near 44th Street, are 1950s MiMo resort towers and not Art Deco in any sense. Presenting all 287 as one architectural category would be a claim our data cannot support and our own coordinates contradict.
Five Ocean Drive buildings, as their pictures show them
Five of the 158 rows inside the district band, listed north to south. The image on each card is the Commons file attached to the Wikidata record: the Cardozo's dates from about 1948 and the Colony's from 1936, while the Carlyle, the Breakwater and the Clevelander carry photographs taken since 2016. We hold no telephone, no address, no rating and no booking link for any of the five.
With no description field, the names are the document
The only text we hold on these rows is the name — and 287 names from one small island in one industry turn out to be readable. 255 of the 287 contain the word Hotel, and 18 are Apartment Hotels or Apartments, a distinctly pre-war category for a building let by the season rather than by the night. Read together, the names fall into families.
- Borrowed geography. Alamac, Barbizon, Biarritz, Granada, Habana, Martinique, Montmartre, Normandie, Sorrento, Versailles. A Miami Beach hotel of the 1930s was very often named after somewhere in Europe that it did not remotely resemble.
- Borrowed New York. Chelsea, Delmonico, Essex House, Gotham, New Yorker, Waldorf Towers, Barclay Plaza. The winter clientele came down from the north-east, and the names were chosen to be recognised by them before they arrived.
- Presidents and patriots. George Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Taft, William Penn, MacArthur — six of them, clustered in the same period as the European borrowings and doing the opposite job.
The names also show where the data has lost track of the buildings. The row called Casa Casuarina Apartments carries a picture filed under a third name, the Amsterdam Palace — the building most people now know as the Versace mansion. Haddon Hotel carries a photograph of the Oceanic. And the only pair of rows in the whole set that share a coordinate pair are Casa Faena and Hotel Claridge, whose image is filed as El Paraiso Apartments: one address, three names, two rows. When a building has been renamed four times, Wikidata holds one name and Commons holds another.
We can tell you what 287 buildings were called and how they wished to be seen in 1945. We cannot tell you which of them you could sleep in tonight, and no amount of writing around the gap would change that.
What we don't know
- Whether any given building still stands, still trades, or is still a hotel. Wikidata catalogues buildings, demolished ones included, and we hold no operating-status field at all. Anyone using this page for planning should check a name against the Miami Design Preservation League's own register. We have not done that building by building and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
- Nothing about rooms, prices, star grades, ratings or reviews. Those columns are empty on all 287 rows and on almost our whole catalogue — we hold booking links for 13 properties out of 132,375. Nothing on this page is bookable through us, and the hotel cards above are records, not offers.
- Whether the photograph actually matches the row. We found at least three cases where it demonstrably does not. Nobody has checked the other 284 pairings, so a picture here is Wikidata's best guess at a likeness, not a verified one.
- The architectural style of any individual building. There is no style field. Art Deco in this article refers to the historic district's name and to the era the postcards were printed in — never to a claim about a particular facade.
- Anything about the 403 American rows whose city reads Unknown. Two of them sit inside the Miami Beach coordinate box and are almost certainly part of this set. We left them out because we could not confirm it, which makes 287 a floor rather than a total.
- Whether 287 is a count of buildings. It is a count of rows. All 287 names are distinct and 286 of the 287 coordinate pairs are distinct, so there is no mass duplication — but a building renamed twice could still sit in the table twice, and at least one does.
Sources
Building records from Wikidata, whose metadata is released under CC0 1.0 — the metadata is public domain, the photographs are not and are licensed one by one. Image dates, authors and licences read from the Wikimedia Commons API for all 287 files on 17 August 2026. Hero image: the Colony Hotel on Ocean Drive, a 1936 postcard published by Curt Teich & Co., Chicago, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. District context: the Miami Beach Architectural District, National Register of Historic Places, 1979 — the latitude lines used to divide the table above are ours, and are printed with it.
More from the same catalogue
- Prague's hotel buildings, photographed street by street — the same Wikidata problem, answered by one volunteer with a camera and a list of addresses.
- Barcelona's Eixample: 52 hotel buildings in one neighbourhood — the densest hotel label in our Spanish data, and the man who photographed most of it.
- Where to sleep above 2,000 metres in South Tyrol — what one of these articles looks like when the register actually carries facts.
- Every American property we hold — the destination page behind these counts.
