Tucked away off Collins Avenue on Miami Beach’s North Shore, the two beachside blocks of Ocean Terrace could have been the neighborhood’s answer to Ocean Drive, only in miniature.
Ocean Terrace — the heart of a tiny historic district — boasts a trio of Art Deco hotels supplemented by a handful of modest Miami Modern buildings fronting a broad beachfront promenade. But that’s where the resemblance to its more-illustrious South Beach counterpart ends.
Ocean Terrace is half-dead. All but one of its four MiMo buildings are sealed up, and most of the southern block is occupied by the massively banal, mostly vacant retail base of a 270-foot condo tower, approved before the historic district was created in 1996, that juts up like an angry middle finger over the low-scale neighborhood around it.