The MiMo / Postwar Boom
What Happened
The returning soldiers of the war came back, and Miami boomed. The late 1940s and 1950s were the golden age of tourist Miami — the era of the big resort hotel, the variety show, the honeymoon and the convention, when the city sold itself to middle-class and aspirational America as the affordable glamour capital of the hemisphere. The architecture matched the mood. Morris Lapidus, the era's defining designer, rejected restraint entirely and built theatrical, curving, deliberately excessive resort palaces — the Fontainebleau (1954) and the Eden Roc chief among them — in a style later christened MiMo, or Miami Modern. Lapidus wanted architecture that made ordinary people feel like movie stars, and the Beach gave him the canvas.
Money flowed from more than tourism. Mid-century Miami Beach was a node in the national gambling and organized-crime economy, with figures like Meyer Lansky operating in and around the hotels and clubs; the line between legitimate resort and laundered cash was blurry, as it would be again in a later era. The glamour was real, and so was the underworld feeding it.
And the whole golden age ran on segregation. Miami was a Southern city under Jim Crow, and the Black performers who headlined the Beach's showrooms — the biggest names in American entertainment — were barred from staying in the hotels where they performed. They stayed instead in Overtown, whose nightclub strip became famous in its own right as "Little Broadway," an after-hours scene where the stars played a second show for Black audiences. The brilliance of mid-century Miami and the cruelty of its racial order were the same system.
Why It Mattered
This era fixed Miami's identity as a place of manufactured glamour and aspirational fantasy — the Miami Beach "id" that this site keeps returning to. Lapidus's conviction that architecture should be pleasurable, theatrical, and a little vulgar is, arguably, the closest thing Miami has to a native design philosophy, and it runs straight through to the city's later self-presentation. The MiMo aesthetic, dismissed for decades as kitsch, is now protected and prized.
It also set the stage, in two opposite ways, for everything that followed. The segregated glory of Overtown's Little Broadway was about to be destroyed — not by decline but by deliberate policy, when highway construction drove I-95 straight through the neighborhood in the 1960s. And the confident, booming, tourist-rich Miami of the 1950s was the city that the Cuban exiles would arrive into in 1959 — a place with the infrastructure and the economy to absorb a sudden enormous migration, and to be transformed by it.
Where You See It Today
The Fontainebleau and Eden Roc still stand in Mid-Beach as the icons of the era, and the broader MiMo district along the upper Beach and Biscayne Boulevard is now a recognized and protected architectural style. Overtown carries the harder legacy — the memory of Little Broadway and the scar of what came after. And the whole idea of Miami as a place you go to feel more glamorous than you are, sold to the masses, is the MiMo era's enduring export.
Further Reading
- Morris Lapidus, Too Much Is Never Enough (memoir)
- Marvin Dunn, Black Miami in the Twentieth Century — Overtown and Little Broadway
- Howard Kleinberg, Miami Beach: A History
- T.D. Allman, Miami: City of the Future
- HistoryMiami Museum collections
Neighborhoods shaped: Miami Beach · Mid-Beach · Overtown People: Morris Lapidus · Meyer Lansky Movements: The Jewish Migration Adjacent eras: WWII Miami · The First Cuban Exile Wave