The past has a way of catching up to us in odd and unexpected ways. A friend of mine was once walking the streets of Venice and encountered the smell of sausages cooking somewhere. The aroma immediately aroused in her rich Venetian memories—not of Venice, Italy, but of Venice, California, the seaside resort where she had spent many childhood summers half a century before, basking in the sun and eating hot sausages bought from street vendors.

The photographs on these pages document a different kind of historical trigger mechanism—and in this case, the memories evoked are as much national as personal. Even for those of us who did not grow up in the Depression years, the buildings shown here tap a Sargasso Sea of memory, of Cole Porter songs and Ernst Lubitsch movie comedies, of Benny Goodman and the Big Bands, of streamliners and ocean liners—of an age that attempted to use style to escape the substance of a world apparently gone mad.

The style represented here was called Art Deco, of course, a burst of architectural modernism that flourished best in the decade of the thirties and nowhere more flamboyantly than in Miami Beach, Florida, where these buildings still endure. They were photographed by David Kaminsky, who is preparing a book on the subject of Miami Art Deco. With good reason, for in May, 1979, a square-mile section of the city was entered into the lists of the National Register of Historic places—the first twentieth-century district to be so honored.

The tiny strip of island on which Miami Beach was erected remained a barely developed stretch of sand and mangrove swamp until the arrival in 1912 of Carl Fisher, a founder of the Prest-O-Lite Company, creator of the Indianapolis Speedway, and chief promoter of the Lincoln Highway (see “The Man Who Invented Miami Beach,” by Joe McCarthy, AMERICAN HERITAGE , December, 1975). By the middle of the 1920’s, Fisher’s energies—coupled with the incredible Florida land boom of the period—had been largely responsible for transforming the jungle-ridden sandspit into a winter playground, complete with sumptuous homes, hotels, apartment complexes, golf courses, and polo fields.

Then came the hurricane of September, 1926, whose winds and waters destroyed almost everything in sight. This did not daunt Fisher. “Miami Beach was built from a mangrove swamp to an artist’s picture of reality,” he announced. “What was once done can be done again.”

And so it was—although this time without Fisher, for the most part. The hurricane and ruinous real estate investmerits in Montauk at the eastern tip of Long Island sucked away his fortune; when he died in 1939, he left only forty thousand dollars. By the time of his death, however, Miami Beach had been reinvented, once again—perhaps even more so— as “an artist’s picture of reality,” a pastel confection of Art Deco rampant upon a field of sand.

For the next two decades the district enjoyed a steady