The area is well known as the district where Italian fashion designer Gianni Versace lived and was assassinated by Andrew Cunanan, in a mansion on Ocean Drive.

It is bounded[2] by the Atlantic Ocean to the east, Sixth Street to the south, Alton Road to the west and the Collins Canal and Dade Boulevard to the north.

This historic district holds the largest collection of Art Deco buildings in the world, an umbrella term covering a range of styles such as “Streamline”, “Tropical”, and “Med-deco” and built mostly between the Great Depression and the early 1940s.

The designs are often described as evoking technological modernity, resilience, and optimism.

[3] The Miami Beach Art Deco Museum describes the Miami building boom as coming mostly during the second phase of the architectural movement known as Streamline Moderne, a style that was “buttressed by the belief that times would get better, and was infused with the optimistic futurism extolled at American’s World Fairs of the 1930s.”[4] In 1989, it was listed in A Guide to Florida's Historic Architecture, published by the University of Florida Press.