Washington Beach

Washington Beach is a returning name from 2002's Vice City, where it sat between Ocean Beach and Vice Point along the beachfront. For GTA 6 the district has not been officially confirmed; its placement comes from leak and community analysis of the map rather than Rockstar's own area copy, which is why it carries a lower confidence flag. The real basis is Miami Beach's Art Deco district, and it survives by a narrow margin. Several hundred hotels and apartment buildings went up along Ocean Drive and Collins Avenue in the 1930s in a style local to the city, streamlined, pastel, with porthole windows, eyebrow ledges over the openings, and neon outlining the parapets at night. By the 1970s the neighborhood had decayed badly and developers were preparing to clear it.

What stopped them was a preservation campaign led by Barbara Baer Capitman, who founded the Miami Design Preservation League in 1976 and got roughly a square mile listed on the National Register in May 1979, the first urban twentieth-century district in the country to be protected that way. The buildings were then repainted to a pastel scheme chosen by Leonard Horowitz, who had co-founded the League with her. Most visitors assume those colours are original. They are not; the historical palette was more muted. The 1980s look that Vice City trades on is partly a 1980s reinvention.

Whether GTA 6 uses the Washington Beach name at all is unknown. The beachfront itself is clearly present in trailer footage; the district naming is not official.