South Florida is a flat, porous, limestone plain without major rivers or streams and with a shallow soil cover. A few feet below it is a massive aquifer that covers about 3,000 square miles, evenly dived between present-day Broward and Miami-Dade counties. Its depth ranges from 20 to 140 feet and its bottom consists of impermeable rock called marl. At times of heavy rain, the aquifer would fill to capacity and surplus water would slowly flow south through the Everglades. Hence, most of the area was subject to recurrent flooding. Hundreds of years ago the Tequesta chose to live on the elevated coastal ridge, at the mouth of the Miami River, precisely for that reason. The “river of grass,” as Marjorie Stoneman Douglas famously called the Everglades in later years, was about 40 miles wide and flowed at the tranquil speed of about a mile per day.9 From Lake Okeechobee in the north all the way south toward the mangrove swamps on the Florida Bay, it created a unique American ecosystem and wildlife habitat. It was one of the world’s great wetlands.
But that is not how people looked at it. When Napoleon Bonaparte Broward was elected governor of Florida in 1905, his campaign promise was to create an “Empire of the Everglades” by draining it.10 The chief purpose was the creation of agricultural land and Broward’s plans received enthusiastic support11—protests in the legislature were timid and mainly limited to concerns that the plans would first “drain” the state’s budget. The Everglades Drainage District was created in 1907, opening the door to massive digging of canals and the construction of levees. One of the new waterways intended to control water levels and transport surplus water rapidly and directly out to the ocean was the Miami Canal (1909), connecting Lake Okeechobee directly with the Miami River. The drainage projects started to gradually dry out the Everglades, and hardly anybody was paying attention.12
Around the turn of the century the city of Miami itself received a good number of temporary visitors.13 The drainage of the Everglades and the building of the railroad brought many construction workers. It was hard work and there were quite a few deserters. Most of the railroad workers kept moving down south with the track construction. The Spanish-American War involving Cuba led to the establishment of Camp Miami and brought an estimated seven thousand soldiers, most of whom left within months without having experienced battle. But they had seen South Florida and took the images and stories of Miami’s beckoning frontier back home.
Some decided to stay. Between 1900 and 1920, the county’s population increased to 42,753. This was without the county’s northern portions, which became Palm Beach County in 1909 and Broward County in 1915. By 1920, the population of Palm Beach County was 18,654 and that of Broward was 5,135. Southeast Florida had 9 percent of the total population of Florida in 1920, a small but rapidly increasing share. New population clusters sprang up around the area and several new cities were incorporated. They usually counted no more than a few hundred inhabitants. In the south, Homestead became a city in 1913 and Florida City followed in 1915—the latter with a large African American population. These were quiet agricultural towns that lacked the metropolitan aspirations of Miami, as they still do today. Homestead is located about thirty-five miles southwest of the center of Miami, up against the Everglades. Florida City borders Homestead to the south, the last stop before leaving the mainland for the Keys. These parts first attracted settlers in the 1890s when the so-called Homesteaders Trail opened up. After the railway arrived in 1904 population growth accelerated.
Up north, in present-day Broward and Palm Beach counties, some towns were incorporated as well and they too were mainly farming communities: Dania in 1904, Pompano in 1908, and Fort Lauderdale in 1911. Prior to the railroad, these coastal towns had been connected by a main road for several years. Fort Lauderdale was named after a U.S. military post built near the mouth of the New River during the Second Seminole War in 1838. After the wars the area was abandoned and it took until the early 1890s before it was settled again. By 1920, Fort Lauderdale counted a little more than 2,000 people.
Between 1900 and 1920 the city of Miami itself grew from 1,681 to nearly 30,000 persons. It was the most central and by far the largest town in a region that did not yet deserve the label “urban.” Several U.S. metropolitan areas had surpassed 1 million people by this time and New York had more than 5 million. Miami was only a small, and still quite insignificant, dot on a big map. This was also true in comparison to South America, where, for example, Buenos Aires already had more than 1.5 million inhabitants and boasted the continent’s first subway system. But in relative terms, Miami’s growth was considerable and it was clear that this time around its development would not be cut short or reversed. The city expanded to the north, west, and south and the downtown area grew denser. In 1912, a Burdines department store opened in a new five-story building, the city’s first skyscraper. It was an event, city leaders said, that heralded the arrival of new times.
The most impressive changes in the first few decades of the twentieth century were eastward and had to do with the “billion dollar sandbar” that would become Miami Beach. Situated a couple of miles across the bay, it was an elongated island only about a thousand feet wide filled with swamp, mangroves, and mosquitoes. One of the first major infrastructure projects in South Florida, in 1905, was Government Cut, an east-west harbor channel that cut through the southern part of Miami Beach. In previous times, all ships headed for Miami had to sail the treacherous waters around Cape Florida, the southern tip of Key Biscayne where the first lighthouse was built. The new channel created a small landmass to the south, later named Fisher Island. To the north of Government Cut is the southernmost point of what is now Miami Beach.
John Collins, a successful fifty-nine-year-old farmer and land owner in New Jersey, moved to South Florida in 1896 and bought up large tracts of land on Miami Beach. In 1911, he formed the Miami Beach Improvement Company and embarked on a mega-project: the building of the first bridge across the intracoastal waterway. It was finished in 1913; at 2.4 miles in length, it was the longest wooden structure of its kind in the world. The island’s development took off and in 1915 the City of Miami Beach was incorporated. More and better connections to the mainland followed suit: the County Causeway (later renamed the MacArthur Causeway) was completed in 1918 and the Collins Bridge was replaced with the Venetian Causeway in 1925.
The state-funded large-scale Everglades drainage projects, combined with the development of Miami Beach and growing tourism, led to the birth of a feverish real estate industry. “Speculators purchased millions of acres of reclaimed land from the State of Florida, then marketed it aggressively in many parts of the nation. The unsavory sales tactics of promoters who sold unwitting investors land that was underwater earned for Miami an enduring reputation for marketing ‘land by the gallon.’ ”14 By 1920, Miami had become a city where “the pioneers were mostly fast-talking real estate sharks.”15 Nonetheless, South Florida was now in the national spotlight and appealed to many, whether investors, tourists, job seekers, or adventurers. Money was pouring in. The city was ready for takeoff.
CHAPTER 2
Shades of a City
The 1920s in Greater Miami “roared” like nowhere else. The first half of the decade witnessed one of the greatest urban real estate booms in history, far beyond the already hot market of the preceding years.1 It was accompanied by what seemed an unprecedented urban culture that combined advertising, spectacle, and the promotion of leisure and pleasure—especially for the rich. The Miami Herald in those days was said to be the heaviest newspaper in the nation because of its extensive land advertisement section. Miami earned the label “magic city” partly for its rapid emergence but also because it was a place where fantasies could turn real. It was a playground for developers and architects. They designed from scratch while living off, catering to, and encouraging the indulgence of affluent newcomers.
This was a formative stage in Miami’s development as a city of leisure. Where other U.S. cities