With the opening of the Miami Beach EDITION, a spectacular next-generation urban resort by Ian Schrager in partnership with Marriott International, the city not only gains a unique oceanfront complex designed for 21st century recreation, socializing, networking, and business, but also takes its next great leap into the future.In many ways, the new EDITION represents the most important step forward for the city since the moment when Schrager’s last Miami hotel, the Delano, opened in 1992—and changed everything. “Up till then there hadn’t been a new hotel built in Miami Beach in almost forty years,” Schrager recalls. For decades, the great mid-20th century resort city and its hotels had slipped into stasis and decline, as the jet age allowed vacationing Americans to flock to Europe and the Caribbean in place of their old Florida standby. But in the early 1990s, Schrager sensed that something exciting and fresh was emerging in the historic Art Deco blocks of South Beach: a new population, and new kind of cultural energy. Building on that realization, he created the Delano—and suddenly Miami Beach was on the map again, the hotel’s cutting-edge design and stylish atmosphere drawing sophisticated travelers back to the city for the first time in a generation. “The fundamentals were always there: the ocean, the beach, the weather, the frequent flights,” Schrager notes. “All one had to do, it seemed to me, was create something special and comfortable; it was an example of ‘build it and people will come.’”
Two decades later, the Miami Beach EDITION represents the next great seminal event in the life of the city. Like its predecessor, it is built upon a realization about the profound shifts and changes that have transformed Miami in the years since the Delano opened. No longer merely a getaway spot for people seeking a break from winter, or the place, as Lenny Bruce put it, “where neon goes to die,” Miami has emerged in the last two decades as world-class capital, a 24-hour gateway city whose cultural scenes— in art, architecture, music, fashion, cuisine, design—now rival any of the world’s urban centers, and attract people from every corner of the globe. The explosive growth of Art Basel Miami has made the city a focal
point of the international art world, while the rise of lively new areas such as the Biscayne Boulevard corridor, Wynwood, the Design District—along with downtown Miami itself—have given it the kind of resurgent, bustling, creative districts that cities like New York, Los Angeles, Paris and London have long enjoyed.
Above all, a tectonic shift is placing Miami at the fulcrum of 21st century culture, as the longtime cultural primacy of East and West Coasts, built in part on their ties with, respectively, Europe and Asia, is now being supplemented by the emergence of a third great “coast,” looking south, and energized by its links to the vibrant energies of Latin America—in music, fashion, art, design, food, entertainment—energies which are being funneled through Miami as nowhere else, and turning it into a new kind of global capital. “The old ‘bicoastal’ cultural model,” Schrager notes, “is really now more ‘tricoastal’: a kind of golden triangle of New York, L.A., and Miami.” The arrival of the new EDITION, like the Delano two decades ago, will at once ratify the city’s new stature—and propel its evolution even further.
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