Lincoln Road Pedestrian Mall
By David Driapsa

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The Lincoln Road Pedestrian Mall is significant historically in a real estate development as an urban planning strategy to foster economic development and revitalization in response to competition to the post-World War II suburban shopping mall phenomenon. The concept was inspired by urban settings of piazzas and plazas in European cities. The Lincoln Road Pedestrian Mall was completed in 1960, making it the first in Florida and possibly the second oldest extant pedestrian mall in the United States.

Modernist Architect Morris Lapidus was commissioned in 1960 to redesign the Lincoln Road corridor as a pedestrian mall. Once completely open to vehicular traffic, his master plan created an eight block long automobile free shopping esplanade in the Art Deco Style. His design combined the roadway with the sidewalks on both sides into a broad public walkway embellished with splashing fountains, tropical gardens, an amphitheater, and weather shelters as follies.

This pedestrian mall was at the forefront of modern landscape architecture and urban design when completed in 1960. It is an outstanding achievement of modernistic design and remains the most intact and one of the most recognizable public facilities of its type. The design embodies the distinctive characteristics of mid-century modern architecture adapted to South Florida, termed “MiMo” for Miami Modern.

Lincoln Road was created as a real estate venture by Carl G. Fisher in 1914, a road builder of national renown. Fisher had already developed the Lincoln Highway from San Francisco to New York and the Dixie Highway from Chicago to Miami.

It was at the southern end of the Dixie Highway at Miami Beach, then still undeveloped, that Fisher cut a corridor for his roadway through a tangle of mangrove forest from the Atlantic Ocean on the east to Biscayne Bay on the west. He named it Lincoln Road and destined it to become the shopping and social center of the Miami Beach community. Building the road took years of dredging and pumping sand from the bottom of the bay, constructing bulkheads to retain the fill material, laying out, grading, and paving the street and its sidewalks.

Fisher envisioned Lincoln Road becoming a great shopping street such as New York City’s 5th Avenue, Hollywood’s Rodeo Drive, Paris’ “Rue de la Paix”. He designed an elegant commercial avenue lined with wide sidewalks and allees of palm trees, emulating the world’s great shopping streets. He succeeded in making Lincoln Road the premier shopping street of Miami Beach, lined with Cadillac and Packard car dealerships and expensive storefront boutiques such as Saks Fifth Avenue and Bonwit Teller.

Lincoln Road was considered the finest shopping street in the South from the First World War until the 1950s. It was the center of a vibrant retail and multi-family residential development into the postwar expansion of Florida for a largely seasonal population, but the area declined in the late 1950s. Traffic congestion, competition from suburban shopping centers, and changing tourist patterns to the new resort hotels on north Collins Avenue drew shoppers away.

The idea of an outdoor pedestrian mall had been discussed for years before it was adopted in 1958 by the Lincoln Road merchants. Realizing that something innovative had to be done to save Lincoln Road as a leading shopping street, they commissioned the planning firm of Harland Barthomew and Associates to guide the makeover. And in a bold move property owners commissioned Modernist Architect Morris Lapidus in 1960 to help draw shoppers back to the street.

Lapidus was a leading proponent of subtropical modern architecture in Miami and one of the top retail designers in the country. His designs of Fountainbleau Hotel and Eden Roc Hotel were renowned. They offered shopping, entertainment, and restaurants in lavish, theatrical environments with a playful mix of set design. He was expected to bring a similar experience of the lavish resort culture to Lincoln Road.

It was believed that the density of the hotels and businesses surrounding Lincoln Road could compete with the suburban malls if his vision for a pedestrian mall was implemented. He proposed to remake Lincoln Road as a mall, and not just a place of shopping, but the greatest tourist attraction of Miami Beach. He would transform it into a public promenade within a beautiful environment comparable to the greatest boulevards of Europe.

His inventive idea closed eight blocks of the Lincoln Road to automobile traffic then transformed the pedestrian corridor into a modernistic International styled open air shopping esplanade. He illuminated it with twinkling lighting, animated it with splashing waterworks, covered it in a dramatic use of color, and staged it as a tropical garden, and theatrical adornment as in his Miami Beach resort hotels. He offered retail amenities that made suburban malls successful, such easy accessibility, the absence of traffic in the shopping area, convenient parking, a tram system to carry shoppers between parking and the mall, piped-in music filling the air, entertainment and spectacle, and a diversification of shops all wrapped in an impressive artistic statement of Modern Design, which created a lavishly theatrical outdoor environment.

The street and sidewalks merged into a ground plane of alternating black and white piano key stripes that extended the length of the mall. The Complex spaces were filled with lively fountains and raised planters of tropical shrubs, palms, and tree canopies. Thin-shell architectural follies of folded planes and cantilevered canopies were stage sets in a well-ordered three-dimensional pedestrian environment leading shoppers to eye-catching storefront displays. The commercial aspect of shopping was enhanced with outdoor dining areas and live performances that encouraged visitors to linger and patronize the surrounding businesses.

Theatrical lighting effects created by Broadway lighting designer Abe Feder were key component of the transformed environment illuminated by mercury vapor floodlights mounted on sixty-foot masts and underwater in the pools and fountains. The Palm Beach Post described the scene as an sparkling garden, a world’s fair and a shopping avenue, all wrapped in one, shining in the glitter of a thousand lights.

While the mall altered the historic street character with updated storefront facades and modern surfaces, the relationship of the original development patterns between buildings, blocks and sidewalks remained. Most buildings retained wide roof overhangs, open breezeways, and extensive use of tile and stone.

The mall was successful trough the decade, but deteriorated in the 1970s as the Colombia Medellin cartel flooded Miami Beach with cocaine, fear, crime, and businesses of less than charming appeal. In 1981 Miami-Dade led the United States in murders. By the middle of the 1980’s, more than a quarter of the Lincoln Road shops were vacant, hit hard by desperate times, withered away as a “period piece.” The merchants blamed it on the pedestrian mall and asked the city to open the street to traffic again.
At the lowest point, artists occupied empty, run-down storefronts along Lincoln Road and set up studios in the low rent spaces. The decline continued until the low cost of property and Federal Investment tax credits attracted rehabilitation-oriented developers in the 1990s and initiated the revival of the deteriorated mall that attracted new shops, restaurants and theaters.

Architect Ben Wood, consulting with Morris Lapidus, restored thin-shell concrete follies, put in new lighting and removed defunct fixtures, and added bollards at the edges of street crossings. Lapidus’ circular pavilions at Washington Avenue were torn down, and landscape architect Martha Schwartz planted shade trees, replaced fountains that were in disrepair and added a controversial new fountain.

The mall was extended west to Alton Road in 2006. Lapidus' design had featured a row of thirteen flag masts at this entrance, but no trace of his original design was salvaged. The 400 block on the other end of the mall was also substantially altered. No elements of the original Lapidus design remain there, either. The landscaping and a contemporary structure that replaced the kiosk and flag masts bear little relationship to the Lapidus design.

On the 500 block, the A-frame structure consisting of two thin concrete plates angled to form a triangle is one of the most recognizable landmarks along the length of the mall. Directly facing it is the Mission-style Miami Beach Community Church built in 1921.

Lapidus closed the Euclid Avenue cross street at the midpoint of the mall to create a "doubleblock" with an amphitheater envisioned as a central gathering space for exhibits and fashion shows. He labeled it "lawn display" on his plans. Here he set a winged canopy structure with a dramatically cantilevered roof that swoops upward, covering performers and projecting sound out to the audience. It also drains rain water down into a basin into a waterfall that spills into a pool. The seating provides a good resting point, and like all of the follies along the mall, this space serves as al fresco seating for neighboring restaurants.  

The 800 block features the clearest example of the interrelationship Lapidus created between shelter and planter and a play on positive and negative spaces of two distinct planes. The nine-story historic Mediterranean Revival Van Dyke Building serves as an architectural anchor to this block.

The open character of the 900 block is due to the absence of a substantial canopy structure, and in contrast with the other blocks. Period brochures referred to the space as the "museum-on-the-mall." The thin-shelled concrete umbrellas were originally display cases.

A thin-shell concrete canopy structure spans most of the 1000 block. The Art Deco Style Colony Theatre built in 1934 is an architectural landmark.

The 1100 block was closed to traffic in 2010, with parking removed and rehabilitated to the design of landscape architect Raymond Jungles. The character here is influenced more by the tropical modernist landscapes of Roberto Burle Marx than the early modernism of Morris Lapidus. No elements of the Lapidus design remain.

The New World Symphony Orchestra Hall designed by Frank Gehry-designed and the mixed use structure at the western end of the mall designed Herzog & De Mueron's have become the new focus of Lincoln Road, making it again one of the most popular destinations in South Beach and attracting shoppers with designer boutiques, local merchants and national retail stores, restaurants and bars, performing arts venues, studios and gallery spaces for artists.

In 2010, the Lincoln Road Pedestrian Mall celebrated its 50th anniversary. On May 6, 2011, it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

David J Driapsa Landscape Architect

djdhla@naples.net

(239) 591-2321

Please visit www.davidjdriapsa.com for more information

Registered Professional Landscape Architect, Florida LA0001185

(C) Copyright 1993-2016 David J Driapsa