Miami Tourist Guide

The Miami-Dade County Courthouse

Continue west along the street you’ll hit the four forbidding Doric columns which mark the entrance to the Dade County Courthouse, at no. 73, W. Flagler Street. Built in 1926 around a still-extant courthouse- where public hangings used to take place-this was Miami’s tallest building for fifty years until it was superseded by the 55-story First Union Financial Center on South Biscayne Boulevard. Its night lights used to show off a distinctive stepped pyramid peak intended to serve as a constant reminder to would-be wrongdoers of where they’d end up. It was no idle boast; originally, this peak was the location of the courthouse’s onsite jail, prisoners were known to throw dampened toilet paper down onto passerby, so the holding cells were moved in 1961.

The Historical Museum of Southern Florida

Looming above the piazza’s western flank, the Historical Museum of Southern Florida is home to detailed, interactive displays covering Florida from the prehistoric up until the present. Some of the exhibits are a little worn around the edges, but there’s plenty to entertain the kids including dress-up boxes with period clothes and pioneer toys, while for adults, there’s a small but instructional map collection that shows the gradual European charting of the area.
Where perhaps the  museum is strongest, though, is its post 1950’s display; a pair of tiny boats used by the Cuban and Haitian refugees to on the late 1970’s sits next to TV’s running archive news footage showing local hostility to the Mariel Boatlift in 1980. Also well chronicled are the fluctuating fortunes of Miami Beach, from its early days as a celebrity vacation spot- with amusing photos of twenties Hollywood greats- through to the renovation of the Art Deco district. In its first-floor research facility, the Historical Museum houses the archives of the now-defunct Miami News, the city’s first daily newspaper, and walk-in visitors are allowed to scan the decades of news photography on site.

The Miami Art Museum

Directly across the Metro-Dade Cultural Center piazza from the historical museum, the Miami Art Museum, at 101 W Flagler St, holds a remarkable collection of post-war art, setting acknowledged modern masterpieces alongside quirky, newer works. The first floor of the building offers a rotating selection, refreshed four times yearly, from the museums own collection. It’s accessibly and intelligently curated: among notable works, look for sketches by Robert Rauschenberg, and art stuntman Christo, not to mention surrealist pioneer Marcel Duchamp’s Boite en Valise, which consists of witty maquettes of his previous masterworks, all in a handy carrying case. Yet it’s the museum conceptual art gallery which is the most stunning, especially the bevy of works by the late Cuban-American artist Felix Gonzales-Torres. His organic pieces, designed to change through viewing-such as a stark ream of embossed paper that visitors are intended to sample sheet by sheet, or a help-yourself pile of candy stacked in a stark white corner the dwindles with every hungry passerby- are truly remarkable. The museum often manages to hook prime travel exhibits, too, which are mounted in its gallery space on the upper floor. It’s set to decamp the state-of-the-art site on the waterfront, as part of the Museum Park Miami project, though o firm date’s been set yet.
Opposite to the museum looms the Main Public Library, which, besides the usual lending sections, has temporary painting and photography exhibits showcasing local literary and artistic talents- the narrow focus of which typically makes them worth checking out- as well as a massive collection of Florida-related magazines and books.