Sunny Isles Beach

Sunny Isles Beach is a barrier-island city in northeastern Miami-Dade County, with the Atlantic along its eastern edge and the Intracoastal Waterway along its western. Its origins are promotional: in 1920 the investor Harvey Baker Graves bought a 2.26-square-mile tract to develop as a tourist resort and advertised it as Sunny Isles, the America Riviera. The Haulover bridge, finished in 1925, brought the land within reach of Miami Beach, and developers set about widening streams, digging canals and shaping islands and peninsulas for waterfront lots on the bay.

The area was called North Miami Beach until 1931 and then Sunny Isles until June 1997, when residents voted to incorporate and settled on the present name. For half a century before that this was Motel Row. More than thirty motels went up along Collins Avenue in the 1950s and 1960s, among them the Ocean Palm — designed by Norman Giller in 1948, and the first two-story motel in the country. The pier received historic-site designation in 1982, was restored and reopened in 1986, was badly damaged by Hurricane Wilma in October 2005, and returned as the Newport Fishing Pier in June 2013. The early-2000s boom replaced almost all of the low motel stock with high-rise condominiums.

The city recorded 22,342 residents in 2020 at a density above 22,000 per square mile — the towers account for that. It is nicknamed Little Moscow: Russian was the most reported ancestry at the 2020 census, at 15 percent, ahead of Cuban and Colombian, and the city has more Russian-born residents than any other in Florida. Collins Avenue remains the single thoroughfare and the address that matters.