The last stop on the sketch walk I hosted was the Waldorf Towers Hotel (860 Ocean Drive Miami Beach FL) built in 1937 by architect Albert Anis. A curious and unique feature of this building is the round watchtower on the upper right hand corner. It seems like this might be a good place to look over the street scene below but the glass blocks under the tower verified that you couldn’t actually stand up there and look out the windows of the tower. It was purely decorative.
The structural system is concrete block stucco and has 44 rooms built at a cost of $75,000. The building is nearly symmetrical in it’s primary and secondary elevations. The only exception is rounded corner. The building has continuous eyebrows (horizontal banding) with a slightly projected central bay with a stepped ziggurat parapet roof line. There is vertical ribbing at corner and a central bay and fluted columns support the porch. There is multi-colored terrazzo floor designs with glass block ornamentation in lobby.
With the sketch walk finished and the sun setting we all “threw down” our drawing to see what everyone had done during the sketch walk. It is fun to see the wide variety of styles and then we all posed for photos. This walk was a collaboration between Orlando Urban Sketchers, Tampa Urban Sketchers and Miami Urban Sketchers. A few people also joined us because they heard about it during the Art Deco Weekend.