Art Deco pastels
Miami Beach
Hundreds of 1930s hotels in pink, mint, aqua and peach line the streets behind the beach, with neon at night.
Why Miami Beach is flamingo pink
The southern end of Miami Beach, in Florida, holds one of the largest groups of Art Deco buildings in the world, mostly small hotels and flats put up in the 1930s and early 1940s. They have rounded corners, porthole windows and bands like ocean liners. When new, most were white or off-white with a little colour on the trim. By the 1970s the district was shabby and marked for demolition. A campaign led by Barbara Capitman won it protection in 1979. Her colleague, the designer Leonard Horowitz, then devised a palette of pastel pinks, blues, greens and yellows to bring out the details. Those colours, later made famous by television, now define the place.
Values are fair approximations of what the eye sees there, not measurements.
Colours tied to Miami Beach
Written by the Rang desk with AI assistance. Background: "Miami Beach Architectural District" on Wikipedia. If you know Miami Beach and we have it wrong, tell us.
More colour cities
All colour cities
🇺🇸 Red Rock CountrySedonaA small Arizona city ringed by towers and cliffs of red sandstone, with rules that keep buildings muted.
🇺🇸 The adobe citySanta FeNew Mexico's capital, where a city rule keeps buildings in earth-coloured adobe style with turquoise trim.
🇺🇸 Purple, green and goldNew OrleansA city of brightly painted cottages and iron balconies, dressed in purple, green and gold each carnival.
🇺🇸 Rainbow RowCharlestonThirteen Georgian merchants' houses in a row, each a different pastel, on the waterfront of a southern port.
🇺🇸 Painted Ladies and International OrangeSan FranciscoA red-orange bridge chosen to show through fog, and Victorian wooden houses painted in three or more colours.
🇺🇸 City of yellow cabsNew YorkYellow taxis thread streets of brown stone, grey steel and glass; a green statue stands in the harbour.Photo credits on this page
The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.
- Sedona Us: Adam Baker, CC BY 2.0, source
- Santa Fe Us: Unknown author, CC BY-SA 3.0, source
- New Orleans Us: thepipe26, CC BY 2.0, source
- Charleston Us: Ymblanter, CC BY-SA 4.0, source
- San Francisco Us: Lightandtruth, CC BY-SA 4.0, source
- New York Us: Z22, CC BY-SA 3.0, source