Luxury Hotels and Urban Hostels:Carl Fisher, Resort Architecture, and the Contrasting Worlds of Miami Beach's Pre-Depression-Era Lodging

Luxury Hotels and Urban Hostels: Carl Fisher, Resort Architecture, and the Contrasting Worlds of Miami Beach's Pre-Depression-Era Lodging contrasts two approaches to hotel building in Miami Beach during the early to mid-1920s. Keith D. Revell describes how luxury resort hotels, exemplified by Carl Fisher's Flamingo (1920), offered recreation activities and elaborate venues for socializing for successful businessmen and their families. While these hotels projected affluence and exclusiveness, most of the city's hotels were urban hostels: small in scale, with limited amenities, integrated into the urban grid, and serving a broad array of middle- and working-class visitors. Although both luxury hotels and urban hostels were decorated with Spanish colonial motifs, they differed markedly in size, siting, function, and audience. Luxury hotels and urban hostels thus show how different approaches to city building and urban image making—one developer led, the other market led—shaped the nation's premier winter resort in the early twentieth century.