Ace Ventura: Pet Detective | Española Way — The Corner He Turns Before the Door

Before Ace reaches his apartment he swings around a corner of pink and white stucco, and for a second the film stops being a cartoon and becomes a postcard of Miami Beach. That corner is Española Way, where the lane meets Washington Avenue, two blocks of Mediterranean revival built in 1925 by developer N.B.T. Roney as an artists' colony and rum-era hideaway.

The buildings are barely two storeys. Barrel-tile roofs, striped awnings, wrought-iron balconies, walls in shades of coral and cream that go orange in the late afternoon. It was a rough block for decades before the restoration; now it is pedestrianised, and the tables run down the middle of the street where cars used to sit.

Walk it from Drexel to Washington the way Ace does and you cover the whole thing in four minutes. Do it after dark, when the string lights come on and the lane fills with people eating, and you understand why a director shooting a Miami comedy in 1993 pointed the camera here. The city has a hundred glossier streets. This is the one that looks like somebody lives on it.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.