In 1963, when the beleaguered downtown Florida East Coast Railway station, which opened in 1912, was demolished, the media paid scant attention to it, treating its fate not as a preservation issue, but as the inevitable end of an object that had outlived its usefulness.
Later in the decade, however, the battle in the late 1960s to save the soaring Douglas Entrance to Coral Gables galvanized a historic preservation movement. By the 1980s, metropolitan Dade County had created a historic preservation ordinance, organized a countywide board to oversee preservation issues, and completed an ambitious survey of thousands of older structures throughout the county.
The city of Miami soon followed with the creation of its own historic preservation board. These boards, and others representing Miami-Dade's myriad municipalities, labor diligently and have succeeded in saving some noteworthy buildings and even neighborhoods.
Consider the success of South Beach and the Art Deco district with its hundreds of Streamline Moderne structures built between 1936 and 1941, for instance, or the continuing allure of Coral Gables with its array of Mediterranean Revival-style structures from the mid-1920s.
