I’ve lived in South Florida for all but 3 of my 29 years of existence. The area has changed quite a bit during my lifetime. Today I live in a suburb of Fort Lauderdale that only 10 years ago was pretty much an outskirt of the Everglades. The whole metropolitan area of Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach county is relatively “new” considering that the city of Miami was only incorporated in 1896 (Fort Lauderdale and Palm beach were incorporated in 1911) whereas New York City has been around since the 1600’s. People down here are not very nostalgic about the area since a large portion of the population has moved here from somewhere else.
So its pretty rare that you will walk into some place and see any old photographs of the area. Tobacco Road which is the oldest restaurant & bar in Miami has a few scattered pictures around the building of the surrounding area circa the early 1900’s. But its the exception.
Well, while browsing the interwebz I found out that Google hosts an archive of millions of old Life Magazine photographs. They even give you a tip at the bottom of the page on how to narrow down your search to only include the Life Magazine pictures. I decided to give it a try by using “Miami source:Life” in the Google search box and found some pretty cool pictures of Miami in the 1940’s. Obviously any Google search could have yielded even more results but I enjoyed the Life Mag. photos because of their quality and the way that so many of them seemed to capture a moment.
Here’s some of the photographs that I really liked:
Love the Mink/Bikini Combo
From the Miami Herald: 