Miami Skyline After Dark (2024)

Cover: View from the Centro Condo building looking south on September 17, 2024. The Miami Tower is the building lit up in blue lights on the right. Courtesy of Casey M. Piket.

The featured video was taken from the top of the Centro Condominium building at 151 SE First Street in downtown Miami on September 17, 2024. The condo tower opened in 2016 and sits on the site that the Urmey Hotel occupied for decades prior to its demolition years earlier. While the skyline has evolved tremendously over time, there are similarities between the vista of 2024 and the same view from one hundred years earlier.

In 1924, downtown Miami was being reshaped by a building boom that would peak a year later in 1925. While the Urmey Hotel opened several years prior to the peak of the 1920s building boom, the view from the top of the hotel would have included a plethora of construction projects in and around the edifice by the end of 1924. Many of Miami’s iconic buildings of the last century were erected at a frenzied pace during the mid-1920s.

Figure 1: Aerial view of downtown Miami in 1924, looking north from the Brickell neighborhood, prior to the peak of the 1920’s building boom. Courtesy of Miami-Dade Public Library, Romer Collection.

Anyone who lives in South Florida today would acknowledge that the city is going through another frenzied growth spurt. However, with each passing building boom, the skyline gets denser by the decade. The view from the top of the Urmey Hotel in 1918 provides a view of the final decade of Henry Flagler’s Royal Palm Hotel. It was the city’s first upscale tourist destination inn and provided many early residents and visitors with fond memories of a much more tranquil locale.

Figure 2: Aerial view of the Urmey Hotel looking southeast at the Royal Palm Hotel in 1918. Courtesy of HistoryMiami Museum.

Miami was the fastest growing city in America during three different decades of the Twentieth Century, including the 1910s, 1920s and 1940s, but the unfettered growth of the past twenty years has changed the skyline much faster than at any point during the last century. The running joke during each of the most recent building booms is that if the City of Miami ever declared an official bird, it would have to be the construction crane.

While the bust of the mid-1920s came as the result of a variety of factors, the final blow was the great hurricane of 1926. Many of the new residents of Miami during this timeframe had never experienced a hurricane and it not only scared away those who could leave, but also put a stop to the unbound investment into the real estate market of a century ago.

While new condominium projects seem to be announced weekly, and others incrementally break ground, sometimes years after their announcement, it is likely that the construction crane will continue to be a persistent symbol of Miami’s ever changing skyline. Will the same view years from now be as unrecognizable as today’s vista is compared to a hundred years earlier? Only time will tell.

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Figure 3: View from the top of the Centro Condo building looking north on September 17, 2024. Courtesy of Casey M. Piket.

Figure 4: View from the top of the Centro Condo building looking south on September 17, 2024. Courtesy of Casey M. Piket.