Here’s how Miami Beach was described in a travel brochure from 1939…

Lying alongside the rolling Atlantic like a scintillating jeweled necklace, Miami Beach is set deep in the American tropics—almost 300 miles farther south than Cairo, Egypt. Most cosmopolitan of New World resorts, this streamlined south sea island is ablaze with a fairyland profusion of Spanish, French, Mediterranean and moderne architecture, spiced with inimitable tropical beauty.

The island is linked to metropolitan Miami by three ribbon-like causeways across limpid Biscayne Bay, includes sixteen small man-made islands, dotted with hotels, apartment houses, pretentious estates and modest homes, is criss-crossed by calm Venetian waterways which wind along palm-fringed roadways. Less than a mile and one-half at its broadest point, the island provides easy access to both ocean and bay.

Your visit to South Beach will be one of the most thrilling, pleasurable adventures of your life. Painted verbally and pictorially on these pages is a view of a great resort, this island city of Miami Beach.

For the wallet-weary visitor these pages offer moderately priced efficiency apartments, delightful hotel rooms…for the Sun Worshipper of ample means, accommodations of Continental luxury and modern comfort…for the wealthy visitor, palatial suites of kinglike splendor. Miami Beach is famed the world over for its extensive accommodations. Whatever the taste, wherever the location, whatever the atmosphere, whatever the price—it will be discovered among the superb collection offered herein.

Famed as a resort among resorts, Miami Beach is renowned as a playground—surf and pool bathing, fashion shows, bicycling, yacht and sailboat regattas, motoring, golfing on palm-studded fairways, superb bay and deep sea fishing, tennis, sun bathing, boating, water sports, horse racing tracks within a few miles, bowling, park recreations, canoeing, modern first-run theatres and the throbbing nightlife that is a thrilling blend of Broadway, South America and the Continent.

Curricula of public and private schools at Miami Beach are specially arranged for transfer-adjustments, offering full academic credit with a background of comfort and health. School buildings are sun-conditioned, windows flung wide-open to vitalizing sunlight and ocean breezes—a healthful atmosphere of contentment conducive to undisturbed, enjoyable study.

Yet Miami Beach is a modern city: efficiently-operated hospitals, a complete library, exclusive shops rivaling those of the Rue de la Paix, public parks with lush tropical verdure, one of the southeast’s finest art galleries, municipal golf courses and an extensive transportation system within the city and to Miami…all conveniences of an up-to-date city, yet the charm and ease of a resort city.

Old World charm…tropical beauty…this is Miami Beach.