Collins Ave, South Beach Live Cam

Collins Avenue runs through the middle of South Beach at Miami Beach, in Florida, past hotels and palms. The camera looks down on the traffic at a junction.

The buildings along here are the reason people come. About eight hundred of them make up the largest concentration of nineteen-thirties architecture anywhere, and they survived because a campaign in the 1970s and 1980s got the district listed while developers were queuing to knock it down.

The woman who led that campaign was told the buildings were too new to be historic. They were forty years old at the time; they are now approaching ninety.