Florida

Juan Ponce de León came ashore on Florida's east coast in the spring of 1513, during the Easter season the Spanish called Pascua Florida, the feast of flowers, and named the land La Florida. It became the twenty-seventh state in 1845.

The tourists arrived by rail. Henry Flagler's Florida East Coast Railway reached Miami in 1896, and by the 1930s Miami Beach was putting up hotels in Art Deco and Streamline Moderne, with rounded corners, ledges like eyebrows over the windows, and pastel walls. The Miami Beach Architectural District, 960 historic buildings in all, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.

The poster gives all of that in a few flat, warm colors: a huge orange sun with yellow rays over a teal sky, a pink-and-white hotel with a curved corner among the palms, and a coral-red sedan of the 1950s parked on the sand. Two pink flamingos wade at left in turquoise shallows, with a sailboat on the horizon. FLORIDA runs across the top in cream capitals above GATEWAY TO THE TROPICS, with SUNSHINE YEAR ROUND on a rust band below.