Miami Beach is a coastal resort city in Florida, built on barrier islands between the Atlantic Ocean and Biscayne Bay, and it has been a premier American beach destination since the early 20th century, with a 2020 population of 82,890. It is famous for the Art Deco Historic District, the world's largest collection of such architecture, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979 and featuring hundreds of buildings from 1923–1943, preserved largely thanks to designer Barbara Baer Capitman. The city's history dates to 1870, when Henry and Charles Lum bought the land for 75 cents an acre, and its first structure, the Biscayne House of Refuge, was built in 1876 under an executive order from President Ulysses S. Grant to aid shipwrecked sailors. Pioneering developers like John S. Collins, the Lummus brothers, and Carl G. Fisher transformed the jungle-matted sandbar into a thriving resort, with the first hotel, Brown's Hotel, opening in 1915 and Collins constructing the world's longest wooden bridge at the time to connect it to the mainland. This unique blend of architectural heritage and pioneering development makes Miami Beach both a historically rich and iconic vacation spot.