Miami Beach

The hotel we stayed in on Miami Beach has closed, and we miss it. The Shore Club has stood at 1901 Collins Avenue since 1949, in a building by Albert Anis, and later took in the Cromwell, an Art Deco hotel of 1939. It was the period at its best, the whole thing seeming to reach for the beach. Auberge is due to reopen it in 2027 with 175 feet of beach, and we want to see what they make of it.

We went in January, for sunshine after a New York winter. The flight is under three hours; from London it is a far longer way to come. December to April is the dry season, the island at its most comfortable and its most expensive, and spring break fills it from March into early April, with curfews and a heavy police presence on Ocean Drive. That leaves January the better half of the winter.

Stay in Mid-Beach, between roughly 23rd and 63rd Street, where the big mid-century resorts stand: quieter than the Deco district, and with more money. South Beach is the postcard, some 960 pastel hotels and apartment blocks, mostly of the 1930s, with Ocean Drive's neon running through them. It is also the loudest, most crowded part of the island, which makes it a place for an evening rather than a bed. North Beach, above 63rd Street, is residential, with wide beaches that are rarely crowded.

With two days, give one to the mainland. Little Havana is just west of Downtown Miami, with Calle Ocho through the middle. At Domino Park, on the corner of 15th Avenue, the regulars play over Cuban coffee all day; the games are generally for members only, so everyone else watches. Wynwood was garment warehouses with windowless walls, which turned out to be the point: in 2009 the Wynwood Walls began putting murals on them, and the district is now galleries and breweries. The other day belongs to the pool of an Art Deco hotel, which is what a winter resort raised from drained mangrove swamp was built for. Dinner stays on the island, as bougie as anyone likes.

We enjoyed the restaurant at the Freehand, on Indian Creek Drive in Mid-Beach, and Joe's Stone Crab, at the southern tip of South Beach, where January falls inside the stone crab season of 15 October to 1 May. The Freehand's restaurant has since gone the way of the Shore Club. Joe Weiss opened Joe's as a lunch counter in 1913, two years before Miami Beach was a town, and it shows no sign of leaving.