Fort Lauderdale's Most Iconic Landmarks

Las Olas Boulevard, Spanish for the waves, is Fort Lauderdale's signature street, a genteel stretch of low-rise storefronts, palm shade, and red-brick sidewalks that has anchored the city's social life for a century.

Laid out in the early boom years as the grand connector between the young downtown and the ocean, it remains the place locals mean when they say they are going out.

The central blocks near downtown are the boulevard's most beloved, a walkable run of independent boutiques, art galleries, jewelers, and restaurants whose tables spill onto the pavement beneath awnings and string lights.

Fashion Week, art strolls, and holiday displays turn the sidewalks into an ongoing promenade, and the scale stays human: no towers crowd the street, just two- and three-story facades that keep the light and the breeze coming through.

East of downtown the boulevard changes character entirely, striding across the Intracoastal and threading through the manicured finger islands known as the Isles, where waterfront mansions and yacht slips line the canals on the way to the beach.

To walk or drive the full length of Las Olas is to sample Fort Lauderdale in a single line: cafe culture, canal living, and the Atlantic at the far end.

Bonnet House is a dreamlike artist's estate hidden on a barrier-island tract between Fort Lauderdale beach and the Intracoastal Waterway, one of the last undeveloped stretches of its kind on the coast.

Built by Chicago painter Frederic Clay Bartlett and named for the bonnet lily, a yellow water flower that grows in its slough, the house is a low, breezy, plantation-style compound wrapped around a courtyard and painted in cheerful colors.

Bartlett designed the estate as a winter retreat and a total work of imagination, filling it with his own murals, carved animals, shells, and playful architectural jokes, and his wife Evelyn continued to shape it for decades.

The rooms are less a museum of fine furniture than a portrait of two artists at play, from the whimsical bar to the studio to the courtyard where carved swans and monkeys keep watch.

The grounds are the other half of the magic: thirty-five acres of subtropical hammock, orchid houses, a desert garden, mangrove wetlands, and a resident troop of squirrel monkeys descended from long-ago pets.

Herons stalk the slough and ospreys nest overhead, so a visit is as much a nature walk as a house tour, a rare survival of what this coastline looked like before the high-rises arrived.

Riverwalk is downtown Fort Lauderdale's linear park, a landscaped promenade that follows the curving north and south banks of the New River through the center of the city.

Brick paths, tropical plantings, and shaded seating turn what was once a working waterfront into a continuous public ribbon connecting the city's cultural and dining district along the water's edge.

The walkway stitches together many of downtown's key destinations, passing the Broward Center for the Performing Arts, the Museum of Discovery and Science, the NSU Art Museum, and Esplanade Park, while restaurants and bars open onto the river along the way.

Yachts and water taxis glide past, drawbridges lift for passing masts, and the whole scene captures Fort Lauderdale's identity as a city organized around its water.

More than a scenic path, Riverwalk is the venue for much of the city's public life, hosting festivals, concerts, art fairs, and holiday events on its lawns and plazas throughout the year.

On an ordinary day it is simply a fine place to walk off a meal, watch the boats, and move on foot between downtown's attractions without ever leaving the shade of the palms.

The NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale is the city's principal fine-art museum, housed in a spare, elegant building on Las Olas Boulevard designed by the noted modernist architect Edward Larrabee Barnes.

Founded decades earlier as a community art association, it has grown into a serious collecting institution now affiliated with Nova Southeastern University, its clean geometric galleries a deliberate contrast to the tropical bustle outside.

The museum is internationally known for holding the largest collection in the United States of work by the CoBrA movement, the vivid, expressionist postwar group of artists from Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam, whose raw color and playful figures fill several galleries.

It is equally strong in American art through its major holding of works by the realist painter William Glackens, a founder of the Ashcan School, whose canvases anchor the American collection.

Beyond these strengths the museum mounts ambitious traveling exhibitions and shows of modern and contemporary art, Latin American work, and photography, giving downtown a steady rotation of serious cultural programming.

Its scale is inviting rather than exhausting, a place where a visitor can see world-class painting in an hour or two and still have time for lunch on Las Olas afterward.

The Broward Center for the Performing Arts is the cultural flagship of downtown Fort Lauderdale, a sweeping modern complex set on the bank of the New River at the western edge of the Riverwalk Arts District.

Its curved, light-filled architecture opened to launch the city as a serious destination for the performing arts, and it quickly became the anchor around which the whole downtown cultural quarter grew.

The center houses two principal venues, the large Au-Rene Theater and the more intimate Amaturo Theater, together hosting a remarkable range of programming: national touring Broadway productions, opera, ballet, symphony concerts, jazz, comedy, and family shows.

It is home base for the city's resident opera, symphony, and Broadway series, giving the region a steady diet of first-rank live performance.

Beyond the stage, the building is a landmark in its own right, its glass lobbies and riverside terraces glowing over the water at night and its plaza serving as a gathering point along the Riverwalk.

Whether or not there is a show, the center's presence signals how far Fort Lauderdale has come from a beach town, and an evening performance here pairs naturally with dinner along the river.

Fort Lauderdale Beach is the wide, bright ribbon of Atlantic sand that made the city famous, running for miles along State Road A1A within easy reach of downtown.

Once the raucous epicenter of spring break, immortalized in a beloved 1960 movie, the beachfront was reinvented in the early 1990s into the polished, palm-lined promenade that defines it today.

The emblem of that transformation is the wave wall, a low, undulating white barrier that separates the sidewalk from the road along the central stretch, its serpentine curves and sculptural forms glowing at night and instantly recognizable in photographs of the city.

The wide brick promenade beside it fills with joggers, skaters, and strollers, while across A1A a row of cafes, bars, and hotels faces the water.

The beach itself is broad, clean, and lifeguarded, sloping into the reliably warm Atlantic, with the central stretch near Las Olas the liveliest and quieter sands stretching north and south.

Between the swimming, the people-watching, the sea breeze, and the constant parade along the promenade, the beachfront remains the beating heart of the city's outdoor life, elegant now where it was once rowdy.