6 February 2022
The Lifeguard Towers of Miami Beach
Anyone who has ever seen Baywatch will know that lifeguard towers are used to watch over swimmers so that any potential drowning can be averted as well as limiting any other threats including spotting sharks before they get too close to swimmers. Yet despite this being what you might think of as a vital contribution to public safety is often paid for by fundraisers and staffing is not always guaranteed.
Although the towers all share the same function, they come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Although their purpose is almost immediately recognizable to even the most casual of observers, each has been distinctively decorated, ranging from the garish to the kooky, from the old fashioned to the emphatically patriotic.
You might think that twenty five is, perhaps, too many for a single stretch of beach but hundreds of thousands of people visit the beach each year (not a bad statistic when you think that Miami Beach’s first hotel was only built in 1915): perhaps not so when you consider that Miami Beach has the warmest winter weather on the United States mainland.
There is certainly enough ground for the lifeguards to cover. Miami Beach is 8.5 miles (13,6km) long and is located on a barrier island connected to Miami by a number of causeways. The beach has three distinct parts. South Beach, also known as SoBe is 2 miles long and is probably the best known, containing the historic, art-deco part of the city.
Then there is Mid-Beach, a is portion of the city which encompassing the area north of 23rd Street and the Indian Creek and south of Surprise Lake and 63rd Street. It contains a number of neighborhoods and the Collins Waterfront Architectural District (home to 110 notable buildings and structures built from the late 1940s to the 1960s.
Finally there is North Beach, bound by 63rd Street and Indian Creek Drive to the south and 87th Terrace to the north. The lifeguard towers can be found on all three sections of Miami Beach but most can be discovered on SoBe. Altogether it’s a long beach by any standards.
Imagine all of those people, all of those towels and umbrellas. If ‘because’ wasn’t a good enough reason for each tower to be so attractively unique, to stand out on its own rather than one to be a clone of the other, then the geography of Miami Beach is. On an otherwise potentially bewildering beach plane the towers tell everyone exactly where they are – in their own inimitable way.
First Image Credit Flickr User Dan Lunder
