Constructing Orientalism in Interwar Florida

In 1926, famed aviator Glenn Curtiss oversaw the construction of an urban development named Opa-locka ten miles from downtown Miami, Florida. Unlike nearby projects like Coral Gables, the architects of Opa-locka had a very specific theme guiding their designs: The Thousand and One Nights. This literary work informed every aspect of the town’s appearance, even from a bird’s-eye view: the streets of Opa-locka are arranged in a semi-circular layout, intended to replicate the legendary “round city” of Abbasid-era Baghdad. At the center of the town is the City Hall, an agglomeration of domes and towers loosely looking to the funerary complexes of Mamluk Cairo. From the hot dog stand--decked out to resemble a North African bazaar--to the Alhambra-esque tilework of the local train station, Opa-locka was a dream world built for the aspiring middle-class family during the Roaring Twenties. Through the examination of archival records, historic photographs, and recent on-site fieldwork, I present the architecture of Opa-locka as a fascinating case study of modern identity formation in the United States, as strains of Orientalism intersected with the Garden City movement. Opa-locka fits into a wider phenomenon that I call “Florida Orientalism,” in which the region became a kind of ersatz Orient in the American imagination, a unique set of circumstances leading to a proliferation of architecture and cultural initiatives inspired by the Islamic world. In other words, Opa-locka is instrumental in understanding how the "Sunshine State" became a land of fantasy well before Walt Disney set his sights on Orlando.