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CHAPTER 1

Early Liaisons

The Miami Circle sits on Biscayne Bay at the mouth of the river, on the south bank. It is a perfect circle with a diameter of thirty-eight feet. Along the perimeter are twenty-four equidistant and identical holes cut in the limestone bedrock. The holes were probably cut for the base of the wooden pillars of a round building. Other finds at this archaeological site included bones, human teeth, shell tools, stone axe-heads, and charcoal deposits.¹

Radiocarbon dating of the charcoal indicated that the structure is about nineteen hundred years old, making it the oldest known human-made structure in South Florida. Most archaeologists agree that it was built and used by the Tequesta, a branch of the larger Native American Glades tribe that inhabited the coastal areas of central and southern Florida since about ten thousand years ago. There is no clear evidence what the building was used for, but most likely it had some ceremonial purpose and it must have been surrounded by other structures and dwellings.

It is an unusual site because it is the only one in the entire United States with this kind of structural foundation and it predates other known permanent settlements on the East Coast. It is so unusual, indeed, that in the wake of its discovery there was considerable skepticism. Some argued that it was not a Tequesta site at all but the remains of an early twentieth-century septic tank installation (this view still has not gone away entirely). Others speculated about the role of Mayans, given the circular and apparent celestial orientation of the building. And then there were those, inevitably, who attributed the structure to the cosmic design of aliens.

The circle is of great importance because it provides an unprecedented window on the area’s prehistory, even if it all remains rather mysterious—and we will stick with the view that it was indeed a Tequesta site. It is also significant because, after a long struggle, it was saved from the hands of real estate developers and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2002.

The circle was discovered only in July 1998 after the demolition of a 1940s apartment complex. The prime real estate site was bought by a developer for $8.5 million, with plans for a luxury condominium tower of the sort that have sprung up all over downtown Miami in the past decade. A routine archaeological survey by the Miami-Dade Historic Preservation Division stumbled upon the remains and put a temporary halt to the development process. What followed was an intense struggle involving the developer, archaeologists, the City of Miami, the State of Florida, Miami-Dade County, Native American groups, various public organizations, and stables of lawyers.

In 1999, it almost came to the point that the circle was excavated and moved to another location for preservation—this was, after, all, a highly desirable residential location. The idea was supported by the developer and by Joe Carollo, then the mayor of Miami, whose mind must have been on the prospect of future property taxes. It was a foolish notion even in development-crazed Miami and it ran into opposition. The stonemason hired for the job, Joshua Billig, publicly quit and briefly became something of a local hero. In the end, the developer handed the site to the State of Florida for the sum of $27 million.

But modern-day Miami is constantly in flux and its attention span regarding public matters is notoriously short. There is little time for history in this city. For nearly twelve years after its discovery, the Miami Circle was a neglected, abandoned, and inaccessible grassy lot adjacent to some busy high-rise construction sites. A groundbreaking ceremony in August 2009 to turn the site into a park was based on tentative budget agreements between the city and the state, but few seem to care. The circle stands as a lonely reminder of a distant and disconnected past.

The Tequesta, their name so recorded by Spanish explorers in the sixteenth century, were the first inhabitants of coastal southeast Florida for which we have a historical record.² They descended from Paleo-Indians who came from the north and they were probably in contact with other so-called Glades tribes to the west and north in Florida such as the Calusa. It was a sparse population of several thousands, with small settlements mainly on top of parts of the Atlantic Ridge that rose slightly above the Everglades and that were free from flooding. The area around the circle was one of those small settlements, probably counting about three hundred people. Their word “Miami” meant “sweet water,” referring to the fresh water coming down the river. The inland environment was harsh and the Tequesta had chosen a prime location. Being at once on the river and on the bay gave them maximum mobility and they were close to their main food sources. The sea breezes and ocean views must have been as soothing and serene as they are today. Extensive mangroves provided a protective barrier to stormy seas and an ideal spawning environment for many fish. Multiple generations lived what was mostly a tranquil and sustainable existence, supported by fishing, hunting, and gathering. It was probably the most stable human occupation that South Florida would ever know, but it was not to last.

The first European encounter was in 1513, when Juan Ponce de Leon set foot on the shores of Biscayne Bay. He had accompanied Columbus on his second voyage to the New World and was now the Spanish Crown’s first appointed governor of Puerto Rico. Ponce de Leon called the peninsula La Florida—it is not clear if this was in reference to the area’s flowery appearance or because the landing occurred at the time of Easter, in Spanish “Pascua Florida.” Popular legend has it that Ponce de Leon was in search of the Fountain of Youth (old Spanish sources mention his lack of virility) but more likely he was looking for gold, as were most Spanish explorers of the era. Either way, he did not get lucky. During an expedition to Florida’s west coast in 1521 his forces were caught in skirmishes with Calusa Indians. A poisoned spear was thrust in his shoulder; it killed him shortly after he made his escape to Cuba. Ponce de Leon’s visits to Florida seem to have been largely inconsequential in their own right but they did, of course, open the door for subsequent Spanish incursions, which were usually staged from Cuba. Most of these were confined to the much more accessible northern parts of Florida. In 1565, Pedro Menendez de Aviles founded St. Augustine, fortified the place, brought in Jesuit priests, and oversaw the construction of the first church. This was four decades before the foundation of Jamestown, and so St. Augustine can be considered the first permanent European settlement in North America.

Menendez also established a small mission on Biscayne Bay. He brought a Tequesta Indian back to Havana to immerse him in Spanish Catholic ways, intending to return him to Miami a few years later. But the mission appears to have been largely ineffective; by 1570 it was abandoned. Hence, while faraway northern Florida experienced notable change in the second half of the sixteenth century, things remained quietly the same on Biscayne Bay. Much of this must be attributed to the inaccessible nature of the place: the treacherous reefs deterred ships, the heat and mosquitoes were hard to endure by any visitors, and the lack of navigable rivers precluded easy reconnaissance and mobility. The Miami River, it should be noted, led only a few miles inland where it transitioned into the Everglades.

The historical record on seventeenth-century South Florida is even thinner, with nothing more than some scant reports on small and usually ill-fated Spanish missions that operated from Cuba. In the early 1700s, the Spanish intensified efforts at conversion and brought ever larger numbers of Tequesta to Cuba and some even to Spain. Most did not survive. The lack of resistance to European pathogens, fatal to so many Native American populations in general, had caused a steady decline of the Tequesta. The Spanish Empire in Florida lasted about two hundred years, from 1565 to 1763. The settlements of St. Augustine and Pensacola in the north were the main accomplishments. In South Florida, the Spanish had not come to stay and they did not leave a single artifact of historical significance. But they did bring diseases that virtually wiped out the Tequesta. In 1763, when Spain ceded Florida to Great Britain, the last Tequesta left with the Spanish for Havana. Southeast Florida was deserted.

Great Britain’s rule in Florida lasted only two decades and as far as South Florida was concerned, it was a non-event. Britain divided Florida in two separate colonies with West Florida ruled from Pensacola and East Florida administered from St. Augustine. They did manage to attract more settlers to these parts with newly designed land grant schemes but South Florida was mostly beyond their horizon. British rule came to an abrupt end with the American War of Independence. Ironically, since Spain had sided with the patriots against the British, the Treaty of Paris of 1783, which ended the war, stipulated that Florida return to Spanish hands.

The second Spanish period witnessed sustained arrivals into northern Florida of British colonists, Native Americans, and former black slaves who were seeking economic opportunity or refuge from the newly formed United States. The Spanish referred to the Creek Indians as cimmarones (renegades), which later became “Seminoles.” Spanish rule was weak: English colonists in western Florida proclaimed allegiance to the British Crown, and Seminoles supported the Creek wars with the United States across the border in Georgia. Incursions of U.S. troops into northern Florida culminated in the First Seminole War of 1817, and Spain was effectively reduced to the role of spectator. By 1821, the United States and Spain agreed to a deal in which the United States acquired Florida by renouncing any claims to Texas. With Florida’s accession to the United States, the Seminoles spread out into the central and southern parts of the state, with U.S. troops on their heels.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, tension between the U.S. government and Native Americans in Florida continued to build. Seminole defiance of U.S. reservation policies led to the Second Seminole War from 1835 to 1842, which took place mostly in central Florida. It was a bloody conflict that took the lives of fifteen hundred U.S. troops (as a result of disease, mainly) and many more Native Americans—nobody bothered to keep track. One of the earliest victims on the U.S. side was Virginia-born Major Francis Dade, killed with his entire company by Seminoles in 1835 on a campaign near Ocala, an event that became known as the Dade Massacre. Dade County was named after him in 1836, even though he probably never set foot near Biscayne Bay. When it was first created, Dade County was much bigger than now and included present-day Broward and Palm Beach counties.

As time went on, the war spread southward and reached the area around Biscayne Bay. There were a small number of white settlers who would sometimes seek refuge in Key West, which had grown into a respectable town where many made a living as ship wreckers. One of the main incidents in newly founded Dade County involved the lighthouse at Cape Florida, at the southern tip of Key Biscayne just across the bay from Miami. The lighthouse was built by the U.S. government in 1825 to bring an end to the large number of shipwrecks caused by the reefs (the government constructed the first lighthouse in Key West as well, at the same time). In 1836, Seminoles protesting harassment by U.S. troops attacked the Cape Florida lighthouse and set it on fire. The lighthouse keeper made it out alive and joined his family in Key West, but his assistant was killed. The lighthouse was rebuilt in 1855 and is still there, the earliest modern landmark of Greater Miami.

During and after the Seminole wars some groups of Native Americans moved into South Florida, and some settled in the less accessible Everglades to be safe from U.S. troops. One of these groups was the Miccosukee. They were closely associated with Seminoles but maintained a distinct language and identity. Since the mid-nineteenth century, they have carved out an existence on the tiny islands in the Everglades, living off fish, duck, deer, and small crops and getting around by canoe. Their exact whereabouts were not documented until the introduction of airboats after World War II. It took until 1962 for the Miccosukee to be officially recognized by the State of Florida, and to acquire sovereign nation status within the United States. When discovered, they were the only surviving Native American tribe of the Great Creek Confederacy east of the Mississippi River. With a population count of about 550, they are presently the longest continuous population group of Greater Miami.

For white North American and European settlers, South Florida was hardly an appealing place during the Seminole wars. The official population of Dade County actually declined between 1840 and 1860, from 446 to 83 persons. Most whites in Dade County at this time were soldiers stationed at Fort Dallas, the military post established in 1836 on the north bank of the Miami River, near present day Lummus Park. Fort Dallas was not a real fort but merely a collection of barracks built on land owned by Richard Fitzpatrick, who was born in South Carolina but lived in Key West. He owned about two thousand acres and tried to operate a plantation, but business was not good. In 1842, he sold the property to his nephew, William English, and he moved to Texas. It was William English who platted the “Village of Miami,” but people kept referring to the area around the bay as “Fort Dallas.” About ten years later English, too, packed his bags. He sold the property in different parcels and joined Fitzpatrick to try his luck in the California gold rush. Fort Dallas continued as a military post through the Civil War and was then abandoned.

Figure 1. The Florida lighthouse, undated photograph. Originally built in 1825 and reconstructed in 1855. State Archives of Florida.

South Florida was one of the most remote, inaccessible, and “empty” parts of the country. In much of the rest of the nation, and many parts of the world, the Industrial Revolution, hand in hand with urbanization, was transforming human society. In 1880, a number of major cities had formed in the United States, along with many smaller ones. The New York urban region, the largest of all, had almost reached a population of 2 million. Philadelphia was approaching 1 million and Chicago half a million. Cities like Boston, Baltimore, New Orleans, and St. Louis each housed over 300,000 people. San Francisco, all the way on America’s West Coast, had almost a quarter of a million. The main cities nearest to Miami were in Georgia: Atlanta and Savannah each had over 30,000 inhabitants. In that same year, 1880, the entire area of Dade County had an official count of 257 persons.³

The last decade of the nineteenth century witnessed a growing number of farmers and homesteaders as well as the arrival of some enterprising individuals whose investment in the area proved crucial to its future development. What is interesting about Miami’s beginnings is not just that it happened so late, but that so many key players were established outsiders who came and went, without planting any roots. Foremost among these early pioneers were Julia Tuttle and Henry Flagler.

Tuttle, a widow from Cleveland, Ohio, arrived with her two children in 1891, at the age of fifty-one. She had inherited some 40 acres of land north of the Miami River from her father and she used the money from her deceased husband’s business to purchase another 640 acres of orange groves along the northern banks of the river. This land included the old Fort Dallas and she had one of the main buildings converted into a home. That building has survived to this day and sits in present-day Lummus Park in downtown Miami.

Figure 2. Southeast Florida, covered by the Everglades, 1893. © Florida Center for Instructional Technology, University of South Florida.

Tuttle seemed to be on a mission to turn Miami’s wilderness into a real town and she realized this required better connections to the rest of the country. Her most important contribution was to persuade Henry Flagler to extend his railways down south. Her idealism must have exceeded her business instincts, and the opposite was probably true for Flagler. Tuttle lived in Miami for only nine years and when she died, on September 14, 1898, she left a considerable debt as a result of her land grants to Flagler. Her son and daughter, who were already in their twenties when they migrated with their mother to Miami, did not share her enthusiasm for South Florida’s frontier. They sold the rest of the land to pay off the debts. One moved to New York, the other to Cleveland. Julia Tuttle was one of the first people interred in the City of Miami Cemetery.

Henry Flagler was perhaps the most indispensable of all the characters involved in Miami’s beginning. He was the one who built the railway, first to Miami and later all the way down to Key West. It was vital because it allowed agricultural produce to be transported north. It provided a powerful injection into South Florida’s agricultural sector, which in turn attracted growing numbers of farmers and laborers. According to popular legend, Julia Tuttle persuaded Flagler by sending him a box of fresh oranges from her grove in 1894, the year that the entire Florida harvest some sixty miles north of Miami had been destroyed by frost. At the time, Flagler’s railway was not supposed to go south of West Palm Beach. Tuttle added to her plea by offering him parts of her land.

The first train pulled into the Miami station on April 13, 1896. Flagler was a seasoned businessman whose partnership with John D. Rockefeller in Standard Oil had already made him a multimillionaire. Most likely, he had estimated the profitability of a southern extension well beyond the citrus industry that was promoted by Tuttle. In addition to constructing the railway, he acquired large tracts of land and drew up the grid for Miami’s street pattern. Present-day Flagler Street is the center of Miami’s grid pattern, dividing the city into northern and southern halves. He was instrumental in creating the town’s basic infrastructure with roads and water and electricity systems, and he designated a separate residential area for black workers. He also financed the first newspaper, which carried the somewhat grandiose title Miami Metropolis.

Perhaps most of all, Flagler had his eye on South Florida’s potential as a magnet for tourists. In 1897, he opened the exclusive Royal Palm Hotel on the north bank of the river. It was a grand five-story building fully equipped with four hundred rooms, electricity, elevators, and a swimming pool. The Royal Palm soon became a place to be seen for the nation’s elite. Among the guests were John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and the Vanderbilts. When the city was incorporated in 1896, some of Flagler’s supporters proposed to name it after him, but he is said to have declined the honor. Instead, it was decided to stick with “Miami,” the name used half a century earlier by William English and first recorded by the Spanish after their encounter with the Tequesta.

Henry Flagler became known as the Father of Miami but he was a distant father at best. Born in New York in 1830, he was in his sixties when he came down to work in South Florida. He was already independently wealthy. Between 1895 and 1900 he spent part of his time in Dade County, some of it in the Keys, New York, and elsewhere, and most of it in Palm Beach, where he had his primary residence. From 1901 to his death in 1913 he lived in his Whitehall estate in Palm Beach and he was buried in St. Augustine. Flagler never called Miami home.

It is estimated that in the last five years of the nineteenth century the population of Dade County tripled to 4,995 persons. The rapid increase was due to the railway. A town was arising on both sides of the Miami River, stimulated with the construction of the first bridge. At the center of the town was a retail district along today’s Miami Avenue and the Royal Palm Hotel, both north of the river. The town was supported by agriculture, construction, and incipient tourism. It attracted an unusual mix of people from various walks of life. The material and social inequalities were enormous.

Figure 3. The Royal Palm Hotel on the north bank of the river, 1917. State Archives of Florida.

Figure 4. Teeing off at the Royal Palm, 1899. State Archives of Florida.

Figure 5. Workers digging the foundation of the Royal Palm Hotel, 1896. State Archives of Florida.

For some, like James Deering, South Florida offered an opportunity to live a fantasy. Born in 1859, he was the son of William Deering, a well-known industrialist and the inventor of the harvester machine. Based in Chicago, the Deerings were one of the wealthiest families in the United States. James Deering set himself the task of building “the finest private house ever built in America” right on Biscayne Bay about a mile south of the river. The Villa Vizcaya, as it was named, was inspired by Renaissance-style Italian mansions from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Construction started in 1912 and the house itself was finished in 1916—work on the gardens continued. Many of the materials were shipped from the Mediterranean. No less than one thousand workers were involved, including craftsmen from Europe and the Caribbean, this at a time when the city of Miami counted about ten thousand people. Set on 180 acres, the estate had meticulously kept gardens and was designed to be self-sufficient with livestock, horticulture fields, and wells.

Vizcaya represented the apex of the American renaissance movement. Deering traveled most summers to Europe with his general art supervisor and close friend, Paul Chalfin, to buy materials, furniture, antiques, and art for decoration. The villa had lavishly designed renaissance, baroque, rococo, and neoclassical rooms. Deering spent the winters here from 1916 to his death in 1926. Presently, Vizcaya is a museum of sixteenth- through nineteenth-century European decorative arts and most of the interior is in its original state.

Why James Deering embarked on the Vizcaya project remains a mystery. One might say he was in Miami not to work but to play and he did not associate much with local business circles. His unmarried status, frequent travels with Chalfin, apparent affection for the male nude statues displayed on the estate, and the rococo decorative overkill made it all seem rather queer—but this was half a century before such things were even talked about in public in South Florida. Deering died on board a steamship en route to the United States and was buried in the family grave in Chicago. The beneficiaries of his philanthropic legacy were mainly up north and included several Chicago hospitals and the Art Institute of Chicago. Vizcaya came into the hands of family members up north as well, but they donated it to Dade County in 1952, to turn it into a museum.

To the large majority of the population at the time, Deering’s life must have seemed a fairy tale. Most were poor laborers living in harsh conditions. The clearing of most of southeast Florida’s dense mangrove vegetation was done manually with machetes; it took tremendous efforts and caused a fair number of casualties. The building of the railway and the expansion of farms required hard labor as well. Many workers were recruited from the southern states and from the Bahamas. By 1910, more than 40 percent of the city’s residents were black, most of them laborers. About half of them came from the Bahamas.⁴ Little is known about the personal histories of these working people and even of black business leaders like Dana A. Dorsey,⁵ in sharp contrast to that of white pioneers.

Figure 6. Colored Town, 1906 (later renamed Overtown). © Florida Photograph Collection, Special Collections, University of Miami Libraries.

The Sewell brothers “worked Negroes as their specialty. With hundreds of them, they accomplished wonders in clearing land so that buildings could be erected.”⁶ John Sewell arrived from West Palm Beach to work for Flagler in 1896. To make sure his personal history would not be lost to humanity, the immodest Sewell published his own memoirs in 1933.⁷ He was a shrewd entrepreneur and political operator for Flagler. People would speak of Sewell’s “black artillery” in reference to the groups of black workers he commandeered around town, carrying shovels on their shoulders like rifles. He was known for his manipulation of these workers’ votes whenever needed in local elections. In 1905 Sewell himself was elected the mayor of Miami. His self-aggrandizing memoirs place him at the center of Miami’s growth: “I have decided to have the history published as my point of view is different from the others. My data are from the inside of the ring and absolute facts.” In an appendix on the assassination attempt on the president-elect, Franklin Roosevelt, in Miami in February 1933⁸ he wrote: “Myself and my wife were within 25 feet of Governor Roosevelt and 40 feet from the assassin, which shows after 37 years I am still on the inside of the ring.”

There is a pertinacious quality to stories about Miami’s early pioneers. Although they were portrayed as adventurous and persevering heroes who beat the odds and became self-made men on Miami’s frontier, in reality most of them were millionaires and savvy businessmen even before they arrived in South Florida. This was another investment opportunity and a spectacular one at that. They risked their fortunes, sometimes, but rarely their lives. Most of them dealt cleverly in South Florida’s wilderness and became wealthier still. During the long, hot, humid summers many of them left for their homes up north. In some ways, these pioneers were Miami’s first wave of mobiles. They appropriated South Florida’s earth, and they appropriated its history.

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.