The Miami Beach Architectural District, the official and original name of the 'Art Deco District', was designated to the National Register of Historic Places as the nation's first historic district of 20th century architecture, in 1979. It was at about the same time these photos, archived in the Library of Congress' Historic American Buildings Survey, which documents hundreds of South Beach's art deco buildings, were taken. The District was still raw and quite slummy. Little actual preservation or restoration had been done yet, but the area's 'undesirable' reputation had a preserving effect of its own, as can be seen in these photographs.