Miami: 10 Things to Do
Introduction
City Guide:
Miami
Miami is a place of many guises. There is the hyperreal Miami of Miami Vice, of alligator attacks and Elián González. There are splashy art galleries and celebrity hotels. There are also lots and lots of strip malls. But this collective weirdness happens to sit on one terrific piece of real estate. Miami has turquoise waters and white-sand beaches. It also has gleaming Modernist architecture and impossibly beautiful people. Joan Didion once described the city as having a "kind of perilous attraction." And it does. You can lose yourself here, among supermodels, nostalgic Cubans and the countless figures who live on the fringes — and remind us that until a few decades ago, this was all still frontier.
Like most modern American metropolises, greater Miami is composed of several smaller cities. Here the cookie-cutter developments all tend to blend into one indistinguishable mass of peach stucco and Spanish tile. For the purposes of navigation, however, the city is essentially divided in two: Miami, the mainland city, which is businesslike in demeanor, with offices, malls, arts districts and residential subdivisions; and, connected to the mainland by causeways to the east, Miami Beach (a.k.a. South Beach, a.k.a. SoBe), the slim, glamorous barrier island that is draped in Deco hotels and where life is lived as if it were one big party. If you have only a few hours to spare, choose one side of town and stick with it — or you may end up spending all your time sitting in traffic.
Connect to this TIME Story
Time.com Best & Worst Lists
Most Popular »
- How Syria's Rebels Aren't Winning the War: The Anatomy of a Battle
- Obama Discusses Race, Fatherhood, Responsibility At Morehouse College
- What Is Tumblr?
- Slices of History: Great Moments in Pizza Innovation
- 5 Tech Stocks You Should Have Bought Instead of Facebook
- Timelapse
- Yahoo Acquires Tumblr: Initial Reactions From Around the Web
- Yahoo-Tumblr: It's Not What You Buy, It's What You Do With It
- Don't Drink the Pool Water! It Contains a Surprising Amount of...Human Waste
- 50 Best Websites 2013
- Obama Discusses Race, Fatherhood, Responsibility At Morehouse College
- Excerpt: Author Temple Grandin Reports On 'The Autistic Brain'
- WATCH: Astronaut Chris Hadfield Covers Bowie's ‘Space Oddity’ in Space
- 10 Best Countries for Moms
- Millennials: The Me Me Me Generation
- 7 Employees You Should Fire Now
- The Real IRS Scandal
- Women in Luxury
- VIDEO: Richard Branson in Drag as Flight Attendant
- WATCH: Duck Crossing Stops Cop Chase in Portland
