Traveling: Impressions From Miami

(Drivebycuriosity) - My wife and I are traveling again. We started our travel in Miami, where we stayed 6 nights. The city is subtropical metropolis, a major harbor, a financial center and a tourist attraction. The city is famous for her hip life style influenced by Latin America & the nearby Caribbean.

As usual we hiked a lot and we discovered that Miami is a patchwork of very different cities. We stayed in the financial district, called Brickel (named after some of the city founders who became real estate moguls). This area looks like a tropical Manhattan with a concentration of elegant skyscrapers. Walking south we experienced a sleepy district with lush parks and mansions. Hiking north the classy city changed suddenly into a huge area of waste land filled with construction places. Further north we went through an area, which my American wife calls "low income area", for me it looked like a slum. Behind that we arrived in the Wynwood district, a bohemian neighborhood in the north of the city. Apparently relative low rents & real estate prices attracted a lot of artists and then art galleries, restaurants, bars & breweries followed. Wynwoods´s gentrification created wonders of street art (here my post  culture).

Miami proper just about 400,000 residents,  but the metropolitan area, the sprawl, is much bigger and growing explosively.  Miami and its metropolitan area grew from just over 1,000 residents to nearly 5.5 million residents in just 110 years (1896–2006 wikipedia). Today the city is still a boom town and we could spot a lot construction places all over the city, even more than in booming Manhattan.

High rises, tropical vegetation and the waterfront combine into a fascinating cityscape.

I admired the great number of modern and beautiful designed skyscrapers. Above you can see the South East Financial Center, completed in 1984, the tallest all-office building in Florida.

Above the Echo Brickel, a residential building in the fancy financial district, which offers luxury condos.

Above more of Miami`s fascinating architecture.

These colorful buildings suit well for the city`s tropical environment.

                                                        Tropical Boomtown

Above one of the mansions in the south of the city, which were build in the begin of the 20th century.

The forest of cranes - which we could spot all over the city - is a symbol of Miami`s ongoing boom.

Above the Metromover, a driverless rail bound car, which transported us for free from the Financial district to the north and vice versa.



                                                                 Mecca Of Art

The city is home to Art Basel Miami, a gigantic gigant show, which apparently is fostering the gentrification of city, shaping her into a mecca for art lovers. We visited 2 of the museums, the Institute of Contemporary Art & the  Pérez Art Museum (here my blogposts  Contemporary  Perez)

Miami is also a center of street art. My wife and I stayed there some days ago and were impressed by the onslaught of graffiti & murals. The city was preparing for Art Basel Miami in mid December. Obviously this spectacle also attracts street artists from all over the world. I haave never seen so much and so impressive street art on one place (here my post  driveby ).




                                                         Coconut Palms & Iguanas

We enjoyed the lush vegetation which benefits from the tropical climate and spotted coconut & date palms and iguanas.

A short bus ride brought us to Miami Beach -  a town on a long stripe of land very close to Miami - where we noticed the active beach life beach and even some beach romance.

And at night Miami becomes even more beautiful.

Staying there was fun. Someday day we might come back