To millions of Americans by the early 1920’s, Fisher had successfully associated Miami Beach with speeding cars and motorboats, spectacular stunts, grandiose hotels, mansions, lavish parties, polo matches, bathing casinos, and crowds of sunbathers. His personal relationship with nationally known celebrities and wealthy auto magnates became a powerful engine in selling land and attracting winter tourists to the area. Sleeping under pictures of Lincoln and Napoleon, he was thoroughly enamored with self-made men—like himself.4
Fisher hailed from Indiana and was a nationally known entrepreneur in the automobile industry and in civil engineering. He created the Indianapolis Speedway, developed and manufactured electrical car parts, and was involved in the construction of the Dixie Highway. He came to Miami in 1913, a wealthy man in his late thirties with a passion for speed and spectacles. He and John Collins became the two most influential developers of Miami Beach in the early years—it was Fisher’s money that completed Collins’s bridge. They recruited large numbers of black workers from Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and the Bahamas to reclaim the island from the mangroves and to build roads. The two men ended up owning large parts of the Beach. Today’s Collins Avenue is the island’s main north-south artery. Fisher’s name is still attached to the small island south of Government Cut—according to the most recent U.S. census it is the richest community in the entire United States. Fisher’s personal admiration for Abraham Lincoln was expressed in the naming of various landmarks: Lincoln Road, the Lincoln Hotel, and the Lincoln Theatre among them.
Miami Beach proved a magnet to affluent northerners who desired a second home in the subtropics. Among them were Lindsay Hopkins Jr. of Coca-Cola, the publisher W. C. Blakey, Russell Stover of candy company fame, and Everett P. Larsh of Master Electrical Company.5 On Brickell Avenue, just south of downtown Miami, arose “millionaire’s row,” a string of mansions for out-of-towners of comparable stature. One of them was William Jennings Bryan, the three-time populist presidential candidate. When not preaching the gospel and debating evolutionists, he lent his oratory skills to promote the development plans of George Merrick.6 Like most others on millionaire’s row, Jennings Bryan never really considered Miami his home. He died in Tennessee and was buried in Washington, D.C.
Miami’s developers since 1920 have sought to exploit the aesthetics of the South Florida landscape. More often than not, it was a mission born of sheer opportunism. The most important exception was perhaps George Merrick, whose name is inextricably bound to the city of Coral Gables. Merrick wanted more than tourism, spectacle, and leisure. He wanted Coral Gables to be a “real” place where people enjoyed their environment but also worked and lived year-round. He dreamed of “a modern tropical economy that would attract the new population that would establish the city as a permanent place and bring science, theatre, art, institutes of literature, a symphony orchestra, adult education, and forums.”7
Arriving with his family at the age of twelve, Merrick became one of the few whose passion for the place exceeded the urge to make a profit. His ambition was nothing less than to create a whole new town, the so-called city beautiful. Coral Gables, incorporated in 1925, was one of the first suburban towns designed around the automobile. Mediterranean style houses and mansions were set in lush subtropical vegetation. The gently winding roads, aptly named after iconic Spanish and Italian places, were ideal for leisurely Sunday afternoon drives. Landmarks included the commanding Biltmore Hotel, inspired by the Cathedral of Seville (1926), the elegant Venetian Pool (1924), the Coral Gables Country Club, which served to entertain visiting real estate clients (1922), and many more. Merrick also planned the University of Miami (1925), which, despite its name, is located centrally in the Gables. The development of Coral Gables was (and is) based on very strict zoning and building codes and one could argue that it was overplanned, lacking spontaneity and vivaciousness. But few would disagree that it is a beautiful area in its own right, of a design that respected the natural environment and that has withstood the test of time.
Figure 7. Aerial view of the construction of the Venetian Causeway, replacing Collins’s original wooden bridge to Miami Beach, 1925. State Archives of Florida.
That is more than one could say of Opa Locka, another developer’s fantasy design of the early 1920s. Glenn Curtiss, a widely known aviation pioneer and showman who made a fortune selling motorcycles and airplanes, arrived in Miami in 1916. His first development projects in South Florida were in the emerging city of Hialeah, northwest of downtown Miami. They included a new racehorse track that acquired national fame, a jai alai arena with athletes imported from Spain and Cuba, and next to the racetrack a landscaped lake with two hundred imported flamingoes. Curtiss was one of Miami’s premier publicity hounds, for whom image prevailed over substance and quality and who had no regard for authenticity.
Figure 8. The newly constructed Biltmore Hotel, 1926. State Archives of Florida.
Opa Locka was meant to be the “Baghdad of Florida,” a page out of “Arabian Nights” and the greatest collection of Moorish architecture in the Western Hemisphere. The name of the area came from the Native American word “Opatishawockalocka,” a tongue twister that had to be shortened and simplified to suit potential buyers. By 1926, Curtis had constructed over a hundred buildings with an array of domes, minarets, and other Moorish features. The streets bore names like Sinbad, Caliph, and Aladdin. The main road through town was (and is) Alibaba Avenue. Even for South Florida, it was too much. The area did not entice many wealthy buyers. These were drawn, instead, to more appealing and prestigious residential environs that would leave less doubt about their taste. The quality of construction in Opa Locka was poor and much of the area was destroyed or damaged in the hurricane of 1926. It soon became a low-income neighborhood, a painful contrast to nearby Coral Gables.
The boom of the 1920s was accompanied by fast population growth. Between 1920 and 1930, Dade County’s population increased from 43,000 to 143,000 and Broward’s from 5,000 to 20,000. Many cities were incorporated in both counties: Coral Gables, Hialeah, Miami Springs, Opa Locka, North Miami, South Miami, North Miami Beach, Golden Beach, Davie, Deerfield Beach, Hallandale, Hollywood, Lauderdale by the Sea, and Oakland Park. The most spectacular growth was in Miami Beach: between 1920 and 1930 its population increased by 1,000 percent from 644 to 6,500. These numbers did not include the winter population on the Beach, which was estimated at 40,000 in 1925.8 In the same year the number of hotels on Miami Beach had increased to 234. South Florida, and especially the Beach, became an important destination for seasonal migrants and snowbirds from the north. Most of the hotels opened in the winter only. The present-day Wolfsonian Museum on Collins Avenue (1927) was originally built as a summer storage facility for the winter visitors.
Land prices on Miami Beach went up 1,800 percent between 1916 and 1925. So much money was poured into South Florida that it drained a couple of Massachusetts banks and caused them to fail. Seven banks in Ohio joined forces to launch an advertising campaign blasting Florida.9 A very large percentage of investment was speculative and sometimes land would change hands several times a day. It was only a matter of time before the bubble would burst.
Figure 9. Biscayne Boulevard, downtown Miami, around 1930. State Archives of Florida.