Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
PERFORMING ARTS
Iconic American playwright Tennessee Williams called Key West home on and off for over
30 years, but Florida doesn't have much of a homegrown theater or dance tradition.
However, several South Florida cities offer top-drawer performing arts and some spec-
tacular stages.
Naturally, Miami leads the way. The Miami City Ballet, a Balanchine company, is one of
the nation's largest. The statewide
Florida Dance Association
(
www.floridadanceassociation.org
)
promotes dance performances and education. Miami's
showstopper is the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, but also don't miss
the New World Center. Tampa and St Petersburg also have large, lauded performing-arts
centers.
For good regional theater, head for Miami, Sarasota, Orlando and even Fort Myers.
Architecture
Like its literature, Florida's architecture has some distinctive homegrown strains. These
run from the old - the Spanish-colonial and Revival styles of St Augustine - to the ag-
gressively modern, as in Miami and particularly South Beach.
At the turn of the century, Henry Flagler was instrumental in promoting a particularly
Floridian Spanish-Moorish fantasia, which, as historian Michael Gannon writes, combined
'the stately architecture of Rome, the tiled rooftops of Spain, the dreamy beauty of Venice,
[and] the tropical casualness of Algiers.' Prime examples are the monumental Hotel Ponce
de León in St Augustine (now Flagler College), Whitehall Mansion in Palm Beach (now
Flagler Museum) and Miami's awesome, George Merrick-designed Coral Gables.
Miami Beach got swept up in the art-deco movement in the 1920s and '30s (which Flor-
ida transformed into 'tropical deco'), and today it has the largest collection of art-deco
buildings in the US. These languished until the mid-1980s, when their rounded corners
and glass bricks were dusted off and spruced up with new coats of pastel-pink and aqua-
marine paint.
Florida's vernacular architecture is the oft-maligned 'Cracker house.' However, these pi-
oneer homesteads were cleverly designed to maximize comfort in a pre-air-conditioning,
subtropical climate. Raised off the ground, with windows and doors positioned for cross-
ventilation, they had extra-wide gables and porches for shade, and metal roofs to reflect
