From the Chrysler Building in New York to the pastel hotels of Miami Beach and the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, Art Deco reshaped architecture in the years before World War II -- though the term wasn't coined until the 1960s, drawn from the name of the 1925 Paris decorative-arts exhibition that popularized the style.

WSJ: Touring Asia's Art Deco Gems in Shanghai and Napier, New Zealand

The first thing that comes to many American minds when you mention California isn't Hollywood or tanned girls on a beach, but Greece.

WSJ: The Weekend Interview with Joel Kotkin: The Great California Exodus

He took her out to restaurants on Sunset, to the movies in Hollywood, or on drives to the beach in rich Santa Monica.

NEWYORKER: Uncle Rock

Add the magic of Hollywood and later the sound of the Beach Boys' pop and cool West Coast jazz: no wonder the world thought California to be especially blessed.

ECONOMIST: The California dream

Sharing what trip afar or film project is next, attendees were given product demonstrations, gratis samples (whether a taste of Brugal Rum or Goose Island beer) and treated as if on the red carpet at the Kodak Theater, Hollywood, instead of just off sandy Long Beach and now in Greenwich Village, NYC.

FORBES: Wipeouts the Norm, the Surfing Industry Grows (Up)

Then there was the question of whose beach it was anyway: Avalon's or Hollywood's?

ECONOMIST: ��Baywatch�� goes out with the tide

Today, it includes 23 hotels, four theme parks (Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Hollywood Studios and Animal Kingdom), almost 100 restaurants, two water parks (Typhoon Lagoon and Blizzard Beach), a sports complex (Disney's Wide World of Sports), and two shopping and nightlife districts (Downtown Disney and Disney's Boardwalk), as well as six golf courses, three miniature golf courses and lagoons with water sports, all connected by a complicated system of free buses, boats and monorails.

BBC: Lonely Planet's top five day trips from Miami