Javascript disabled links: Album Home | Arriving - A Saga | A Place to Stay - The Park Central | The Seen Scene | Sun on Sunday, and The Dead Zone | SoBe's Interstate | Mores Over Miami (Beach) | If it's Tomorrow, It Must Be Señor Frog's | A Tale of Three Teenies | The TV Dinner | A Lesson in Software Design and Ice Cream | My Last Meal

Miami Beach

A Place to Stay - The Park Central

Park Central Entrance at Night Entrance at Night

We have a new regular place to stay in Miami Beach: The Park Central. On Ocean Ave in the 6 block, it's right across from the beach, and within easy walking distance of tons of great restaurants and clubs. The hotel itself is an authentic Art Deco building, built in 1937, beautifully renovated and decorated. The furnishings capture not only the look of the Deco period but also the spirit. For example, the rooms have both a dresser and a chest of drawers (compare to The Pennsylvania in Manhattan), but do not have a workstation. A wood straight-back chair pulled up to a nightstand serves as a tiny desk. Thank goodness the phone has a dataport, though!

Powder Area in Mezzanine Powder Your Nose?

In a charming throughback to another time, the hotel has a area on the mezzanine level where ladies can powder their noses. It's a row of tables and chairs in front of lighted mirrors. You can picture ladies sitting here in the Thirties and Forties touching up their makeup and chatting.

The rooms themselves have been modernized without gutting and reconstructing the building's interior, which took some creativity. I can't resist including this -- there's a latent engineer inside of me -- but I realize that some of you may not be interested how various renovation challenges were met. So instead of including the renovation details and pictures in this page, I've moved them to three popups. You can see them by clicking on the links below, if you want:

Water and air conditioning Water and air conditioning
Smoke detector and fire alarm Smoke detector and fire alarm
Old-fashioned doorways Old-fashioned doorways
 
View of Lummus Park from the Window Lummus Park from the Window

The room is very nice, very comfortable. I'm not going to take up bandwidth with pictures of the room, but if you'd like to see them, click here to see a slideshow. We think it compares very favorably, in price, location, and comfort, to the Crowne Plaza where we stayed last year. There's no hot tub, but the Days Inn (our original SoBe haunt) didn't have one either, and the one at the Crowne Plaza was only lukewarm. The Park Central's pool is nothing to get excited about, but, hey, this is South Beach! You don't come here to hang by the pool. You come here for the beach. And one of the most beautiful beaches in the world is right across the street.

In case I haven't been clear, I recommend this place without hesitation.

All text and images on this page and linked pages are © Copyright Gregory Smith 2004