Miami Vice lives on
With the drug trade in full swing, the television crime drama Miami Vice was the perfect medium to show the world what Miami had become since its formative years as a sleepy beach town. For five seasons, Crockett and Tubbs policed the city’s mean streets and waters during the eighties. And in the opening credits of every episode stood this rare architectural bird that gets lost today among the glass and concrete wilderness on Brickell Avenue.
Completed in 1982, the Atlantis Condominiums personify the archetypical building style of Miami’s salad days. Much like a pubescent teen, the city experienced unpleasant growing pains throughout the latter part of the 20th century. With a deeper voice and taller stature came drastic mood swings and regular distress. Drug violence was rampant, with mall shootings and drive-bys making local headlines almost every night. Throngs of Cuban refugees, many of whom had been prisoners under Fidel Castro, flooded makeshift camps underneath the highways. The old Miamians were moving up the coast, leaving behind a city they’d come to see as hopeless.
Info
Address 2025 Brickell Avenue, Miami, FL 33129 | Tip Drive around and look at the old houses on the north side of Brickell by Atlantis Condominiums. Many are built atop elevated coral shelves, a reminder that the waters of Biscayne Bay once extended much farther inland.
Despite all the adversity that consumed Miami, so too did a zeal to create a better future, at least aesthetically. When Miami Vice was at its peak, the city had become a pretty face with loose moral foundations. High-rises, many founded on dirty money, started growing explosively across town. The architecture firm Arquitectonica spearheaded the shift toward relative decency, with nearly 30 of its bold buildings still accenting the jagged skyline from the mainland to Miami Beach.
In Miami Vice, this achromatic giant is seen with a hollow square palm court cut out of the middle, complete with its iconic red spiral staircase cranked through it like a corkscrew. More than 30 years later, the Atlantis Condominiums are still as slick and open-shirted as the iconic cops played by Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas.
Back
To the online map