Welcome to Art Deco Weekend! This year, the Miami Design Preservation League has embarked upon an ambitious and groundbreaking adventure, a look at the little-known Art Deco architecture and design of Shanghai. And today, we welcome our distinguished guests from China, along with all of you!

East Meets West: Art Deco from Shanghai to Miami explores not just architecture but the history and custom that created it. We urge you to attend our lecture series, held at the Wolfsonian Museum at Tenth Street and Washington Avenue, with speakers examining the architecture, development, and historic preservation of Shanghai, along with an examination of India. Our film series, also at the Wolfsonian Museum, includes such stellar features Orson Wells' 1947, The Lady from Shanghai to seldom seen jewels such as Wu Yonggang's 1934 silent classic, Goddess.

Miami and Shanghai-though an ocean, a dateline, and a continent apart-share much in common. Both are vibrant gateway cities, fast-growing and ever-changing, and both are home to an astounding stock of Art Deco buildings constructed in the 1930s and 1940s. Both are iconic cities, the stuff of film and lore.

In our Art Deco Welcome Center at Tenth Street and Ocean Drive, we are thrilled to be hosting a photographic exhibition of Art Deco architecture in Shanghai. This exhibition was specially prepared for Art Deco Weekend by the Shanghai government.

Of course, the expected Art Deco Weekend festivities remain in place, starting with the annual parade, at 7:30 p.m. Friday night. This year MDPL welcomes the Art Deco Classic Car Fest, sponsored by the South Florida Region of the Antique Automobile Club of America, with antique cars participating both in the parade and throughout the weekend. There will also bee the full complement of vendors selling antiques, collectibles, art, and crafts, along with musical performances, street entertainers, and festival food.

Three decades ago, Barbara Capitman and a small group of artists, architects, designers, writers and educators sat down to form MDPL. In many ways, this was the proverbial “shot heard round the world,” for it was MDPL's efforts to save, restore and promote the Art Deco District that became the linchpin of the city's-and the region's-rekindled prosperity and popularity.

In the ensuing thirty years, MDPL has worked tirelessly to preserve, restore, protect, enhance, and promote the Art Deco District, and even with the many years of hard effort behind us, we haven't let up. This year alone, we scored many preservation victories in Miami Beach, among them the “downzoning” of the Flamingo Park residential district, in an effort to save the neighborhood from rampant overbuilding. We also successfully contested a too-tall commercial project on Alton Road, one that would have cast its shadow long and large over the fragile low-scaled pedestrian-oriented neighborhood next to it. MDPL has also been active in ongoing initiatives to add seven architecturally rich blocks of Alton Road to the city's historic preservation district, and likewise to prevent too-tall additions to beachfront hotels.

We also, in the past year, have sponsored a lively lecture series, hosted a Miami Vice Retrospective that was attended by cast and crew members as well as the general public, initiated a family film series at the Miami-Dade Public Library, and much more.

Art Deco Weekend supports all these efforts to maintain the historic district we all so love, and we hope you enjoy yourselves. We also hope that if you are not already a member, you will consider joining with us at MDPL by taking out a membership and attending our fine programs year-round. Stop in at the MDPL information booth and pick up a membership form. And in the meantime enjoy this journey to the Far East that is Art Deco Weekend 2007.