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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 owed their emergence to a good port (for example, Boston) or proximity to raw materials (Pittsburgh) or political circumstances (Washington, D.C.), Miami’s development was mainly based on a new demand for upper-class vacationing, winter homes, and the enjoyment of spectacles. For wealthy northeasterners, a trip to places like Atlantic City came to be seen as lowbrow. They wanted something new-fashioned, more distinctive, and, indeed, something more expensive and out of the reach of America’s growing middle class. Across the nation there was a new subculture that revolved around leisure and lifestyles, sightseeing and being seen.² In this context Miami became a citadel of fantastical consumption. Miami created an image of “popular engagement with leisure that lingered for decades and functioned as an important component in defining modern consumer culture.”³ No one person embodied this culture more than Carl Fisher:

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.

By August 1925, the market started to stagnate and prices moved downward for about twelve months. Then, on September 18, 1926, a devastating category-4 hurricane struck Miami head-on. The number of dead was estimated at 350 and the material damage was enormous. On Miami Beach, one in four houses was destroyed and the area east of Washington Avenue was almost completely flattened. On the mainland, too, the storm wreaked havoc. It caused irreparable damage to Flagler’s Royal Palm Hotel, which had to be taken down. Thousands of investors pulled out, the market collapsed, and many left the area.

Miami went into a depression a few years before the rest of the nation did with the stock market crash of 1929. Those fortunes not already wiped out by the hurricane were destroyed by the stock market crash. Merrick went broke and spent his last years as Miami’s U.S. postmaster. Glenn Curtiss died in debt in New York in 1930. Carl Fisher lost almost everything, moved into a modest cottage on Miami Beach, and drank himself to death in 1939. Looking back at his adventures in South Florida, he said, “It wasn’t any goddamned dream at all. I could just as easily have started a cattle ranch.”¹⁰

Figure 10. Aerial view of downtown Miami, 1939. State Archives of Florida.

Miami was anything but a cohesive community. There must have been a high turnover of residents, many did not stay during the summer months, and class differences were huge. In addition, the population was divided along racial and ethnic lines, and blatant discrimination was commonplace. Miami’s elite was an exclusive WASP community. Southern racists dominated much of the police force, and anti-Semitic northerners kept Jews from buying land or registering at many hotels.¹¹

Along with the rising demand for labor, the black population kept growing. An area north of the town center and west of the railroad was designated for blacks and in 1911 a “color line” was drawn to restrict its expansion. This area would be named Colored Town, later renamed Overtown. By 1915 it housed some five thousand people. Another dense pocket of black settlers was the so-called McFarlane subdivision in west Coconut Grove, where Bahamian immigrants built their homes. White protests against black expansion into adjacent neighborhoods were fierce and usually effective—the black areas were among the most densely populated. There was no question where the major newspapers stood on this matter: a 1911 Miami Herald article stated that “the advance of the Negro population is like a plague and carries devastation with it to all surrounding property.”¹²

In 1917, a group of whites bombed the Odd Fellows Hall, the black community center on Charles Avenue in Coconut Grove. The guilty parties were never arrested. A few years later the Ku Klux Klan established a Miami branch; by 1925 it claimed to have fifteen hundred members.¹³ In 1921, the Klan kidnapped the black minister H. H. Higgs from Coconut Grove in response to his message aimed at racial equality. He was released after promising to return to the Bahamas. The Klan was known to be closely associated with members of the police force and the force itself was notorious for its rough treatment of blacks.¹⁴ An early postcard from the 1920s shows a festive image of the KKK float in a parade on Flagler Street—the American Legion decided to give the Klan the award for best float of the year.¹⁵ In the summer of 1926, the Ku Klux Klan opened a new headquarters in downtown Miami at S.W. 4th Street and 8th Avenue. It was destroyed a few months later in the hurricane of September 1926—what some must have considered divine intervention. But open racism and discrimination would continue for many more years, with repeated efforts by city leaders (including, for example, George Merrick) to resettle blacks in completely segregated communities further from the city center.¹⁶

The exclusion of blacks from Miami’s designs in this era became painfully evident with the discovery of a historic cemetery in April 2009. The site, at N.W. 71st Street and 4th Avenue, dates to around 1920. Located outside the emerging towns of the time, it served as the final resting place of black Bahamian immigrants, most of whom were construction workers. But its existence was subsequently erased from the records and the site was not marked on any known maps—until ninety years later when a construction crew working on a housing project stumbled upon human bones.¹⁷

Figure 11. Woman at a sign for South Florida’s only beach for colored people on Virginia Key; the sign was blown down by a storm in 1950. State Archives of Florida.

Blacks were not the only targets of bigotry. Jews were shunned and systematically excluded from buying real estate. Flagler, for example, was known to refuse to deal with Jewish clients. The situation in Miami Beach was particularly harsh. When Collins and Fisher developed Miami Beach, part of the design was to keep the area “exclusive.” They marketed their real estate sales mainly to wealthy midwesterners. The Lummus brothers, who owned the Miami Beach area south of 5th Street, started to assume a more liberal posture in the early 1920s, selling property to middle-class Jews from New Jersey and New York. Among them was one Joe Weiss, who bought himself a small lunch stand and later turned it into a restaurant named Joe’s Stonecrabs—one of the best-known restaurants to this day.

The first synagogue in Miami was built in 1913 and the event marked the assertion of the Jewish community in Dade County. By 1926, there were about thirteen hundred Jews in the city of Miami. In Miami Beach, there were no more than a few hundred, and the first synagogue was not built until 1927, on the corner of 3rd Street and Washington Avenue. It is said that almost every Jew who was a permanent resident of Miami Beach between 1927 and 1932 was a member of and a financial contributor to the synagogue.¹⁸ The central and northern parts of Miami Beach continued as the domain of wealthy gentiles, and some hotels even posted signs indicating that Jews were not welcome until such signs were banned in 1949.

The way Miami’s urban society evolved seemed to set a pattern that, with some variation, is still with us today. A strong sense of community was forged among some of the less powerful segments of South Florida’s population, particularly blacks and Jews. These communities had a strong ethnic base, lived in highly segregated neighborhoods, and developed a sense of local identity.¹⁹ The business elite, in contrast, seemed to have a more loose association with Miami. They viewed it as a business opportunity, rather than a place to live, and they usually held on to homes elsewhere. Their prosperity fostered individualism; their mobility withheld local community membership.

And then there was Miami’s flourishing underworld. Like most frontier towns, Miami around the turn of the century was an environment conducive to lawlessness and crime. In the 1920s, Prohibition and the real estate boom combined to turn crime into organized business. Miami became a major port of entry for alcohol smuggling, mainly from the Bahamas, as well as an ideal area for local moonshine distilleries. With its yacht clubs, regattas, glamorous hotels, racehorse track, and gambling parlors, Miami was obviously a thirsty and lucrative market as well. That market got even bigger when the real estate boom lured large numbers of investors to town.

Miami blatantly ignored Prohibition and some of Miami’s “best citizens” were engaged in rum running.²⁰ It was common knowledge, for example, that in Flagler’s Royal Palm Hotel you could have any drink money could buy. Carl Fisher, who himself became a heavy drinker during Prohibition, threw extravagant parties with abundant refreshments for out-of-town clients and friends. Alcohol was routinely delivered to the wealthy on their yachts. According to one account, “Limousines [were] lined up at the wharfs to welcome the boats laden with bootleg liquor that came in from Havana, Bimini, Nassau, and people drove off with their ‘fish’ neatly wrapped in brown paper. At other times, that ‘fish’ was shipped north in refrigerated railroad cars, under cover of grapefruit, tomatoes or avocados.”²¹

The mob was well represented among the new groups of snowbirds arriving in the 1920s. Al Capone drew Miami into his Chicago-based crime network and made millions. In 1928 he bought a mansion on Palm Island, his winter home until he could no longer avoid prison in 1932. The mob engaged mainly in smuggling, gambling, and prostitution, but it also infiltrated legitimate business, including real estate, construction, hotels, and nightclubs. Members of the mob were said to be working quite comfortably with the sheriffs from Dade and Broward counties.²² From the mid- to late 1920s, the murder rate for South Florida was greater than at any time since the State of Florida began keeping records and it was much higher than the U.S. average. “It would appear that there was a … culture that promoted violence…. This culture was fueled by the stress created by the boom and the bust and by the large numbers of transients who had no permanent roots in the community.”²³ From the ethnic schisms and pervasive bigotry to its criminal underbelly, it appears that Miami’s social fabric in the 1920s was as fragmented as it was fragile.

South Florida entered the Great Depression before the rest of the country and it recovered sooner as well—even if it did not return to the high-rolling times of the 1920s. Tourism picked up again in the early 1930s. For those who could afford it, Miami continued to have a special appeal. In addition, the real estate bust of the late 1920s now allowed people to buy land at cheaper rates. Population turnover continued to be very high: in 1940, about one-third of the resident population had arrived only since 1935.²⁴

Once again, some of the most eye-catching developments took place in Miami Beach. The need for new large-scale construction in eastern Miami Beach after the hurricane of 1926 coincided with the arrival of a new type of design and architecture. Stylish modernism originated in France and was highly influential in the 1920s and 1930s. By the time it reached Miami Beach it had evolved into streamline moderne, with simpler structures and machine-inspired, industrial forms. Later, in the 1960s, this style became popularly known as art deco. The deco district in south Miami Beach, about eight hundred buildings in one square mile, was put up in less than ten years. It includes well-known hotels such as the Tides (1936), the Beacon (1936), Essex House (1938), the Breakwater (1939), and the Avalon (1941). The most exquisite art deco building is probably the U.S. Post Office building (1937) on Washington Avenue and 13th Street. The district also included many apartments and served mainly tourists, as it does today.

Among the newcomers to Miami Beach were many Jews who settled mainly in the southern parts of the island but soon started moving farther north as well. The Jewish population on the Beach went from about 300 in the mid-1920s to 3,300 in 1935. The main push occurred between 1945 and 1950 when their numbers tripled in only five years. The Jewish population in Dade County as a whole increased from 8,273 in 1940 to almost 55,000 in 1950.

Miami Beach’s early and vigorous recovery was reflected in the fact that its total population quadrupled in the course of the 1930s. In 1940 the number stood at 28,000 and by 1950 it would reach 46,000. On the mainland, population growth and urban expansion continued steadily. During World War II, Dade County housed several air and naval bases, with a total of 80,000 soldiers stationed in Miami and in Miami Beach. A popular saying went that many had “felt the sand in their shoes” and returned to live there after the war. The overall population of Dade County roughly doubled during the 1930s, again during the 1940s, and once more during the 1950s. Broward’s population doubled as well in the 1930s and 1940s, and then quadrupled in the 1950s to reach 334,000 in 1960. The introduction of air conditioning in many middle- and upper-class homes since the late 1940s (and central air since the mid-1950s) played a part in this growth just as it did in other cities in the U.S. Sun Belt.

The South Florida urban region grew more dense and expanded south, north, and west. Fifteen new cities were incorporated and hundreds of new subdivisions emerged in the two-county area during this period. But Miami and Fort Lauderdale remained dominant within their counties and had by far the largest population concentrations. Major infrastructure developments included the creation of Miami International Airport²⁵ in 1949, the expansion of the port of Miami through the annexation of Dodge Island in 1956, the beginning of construction of interstate highways across South Florida in the late 1950s, and the opening of Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport in 1959.

But while South Florida grew rapidly in the postwar years, the essence of Miami did not really change. It continued to function as a sort of appendage to the nation but it had not (yet) acquired most of the traits typical of major cities elsewhere:

Miami’s postwar decades, bracketed by the return of the GIs beginning in 1944 and the Republican Convention of 1968, witnessed a dramatic demographic increase and a radical mutation from seasonal resort to year-round metropolitan environment. Yet, unlike Los Angeles, Miami continued to be defined in relation to other places (more as a playground for escapees, transient or not, from the industrial northern and mid-western cities) than as a city in its own right. This perception shaped Miami’s status as a commodified “city of leisure.” … [Further, the city’s] infantile and innocent character was exacerbated by the body culture, tropical weather, beaches, golf courses and other amenities. [Miami was a] city of recreation versus a city of culture, a city of attractions versus a city of institutions.26

The environmental transformation of South Florida that began at the beginning of the twentieth century continued apace. Drainage of the Everglades accelerated after the major flooding caused by the hurricane of 1926. The construction of the Tamiami Trail in 1928 was probably the single most environmentally destructive project in South Florida’s history. It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. The 112-mile long canal helped transport “surplus” water east to the Atlantic and west to the Gulf of Mexico. The dike protected urban areas against flooding, and the road on the dike was the first major east-west connection between Miami and Tampa.

The Tamiami Trail also (very) effectively blocked the “river of grass” from flowing south. It dried out much of the Everglades and killed a variety of plants, birds, fish, mammals, amphibians, and reptiles. The growing agriculture sector compounded the problem with the polluting emission of phosphorous, mercury, and nitrogen. More engineering projects followed in subsequent decades. As it became apparent that overdrainage was a problem during dry periods, water-storage efforts were made and the system grew ever more complex. By 1970, there were “720 miles of levees, 1000 miles of canals, 200 gates, and water control structures, and 16 pumping stations.”²⁷

Figure 12. Governor John W. Martin meeting a Seminole Indian at the construction of the Tamiami Trail, 1927. State Archives of Florida.

Widespread public awareness of environmental decline did not emerge until later in the twentieth century. The prevailing mind-set at the time is pungently expressed in the film Sunshine State: a sly developer points to the meticulously landscaped surroundings of an exclusive South Florida golf resort and declares in an imperious and self-indulgent manner to his golfing partners, “We created this nature on a leash.” Still, some important early voices helped to stave off even greater disaster. The first ideas to create a protected park in the Everglades took shape in the 1920s. In those days, environmental consciousness of politicians and business leaders in South Florida and in Tallahassee lagged considerably behind that of some federal agencies. The pioneers behind the initial local environmental efforts consisted of a small group of individuals with influence in Washington, D.C. They included Stephen T. Mather, the first director of the National Park Service, Ernest F. Coe, a Miami local and a landscape architect who was educated at Yale, and David Fairchild, a famous tropical botanist.²⁸ The latter was the first president of the Tropical Everglades Park Association, established in 1928.

After a visit to the area in 1929, an investigative committee authorized by Congress issued a report that revealed the changing appreciation of the South Florida wetlands: “We are compelled to admit that in a good deal of the Everglades region, especially in those parts now readily accessible by road, the quality of the scenery is to the casual observer under most conditions somewhat confused and monotonous. Its beauty in the large is akin to that of the other great plain: perhaps rather subtle for the average observer in search of the spectacular; though sometimes very grand, especially when seen in solitude and at rest instead of from a hurrying automobile.”²⁹

Congress authorized the creation of the Everglades National Park in 1934 and President Truman dedicated it in 1947. It covers almost one-third of Miami-Dade County. The same year saw the publication of Marjorie Stoneman Douglas’ classic Everglades: The River of Grass.³⁰ It was a milestone in South Florida’s historiography because it expressed a view of nature that had been completely overshadowed by the mantra of development. It struck a chord with some segments of the public, but most locals remained remarkably disinterested in the ecological environs of their city.

In 1949 Life contained a feature article on Miami Beach, referring to the island as the “crown jewel” of South Florida. To be sure, the 1950s once again belonged to the Beach. The island became immensely popular as one of the nation’s hottest vacation spots, especially for the rich. The 1950s saw a return of the glitz and glamour reminiscent of the roaring 1920s. Yet again a new style of architecture emerged, mainly in the central and northern parts of Miami Beach. Art deco was already passé and considered gaudy. In MiMo, short for Miami modern, the square structures with rounded corners and symmetrical ornamentation of art deco made way for a whimsical tropical style that was curvaceous, asymmetric, and daring. The best example of MiMo is the Fontainebleau Hotel, at Collins and 44th Street.

The Fontainebleau was designed and built in 1953 by Morris Lapidus, whose adage “Too much is never enough”³¹ fit perfectly with the hedonistic disposition of the Beach’s wealthy pleasure seekers. Many critics considered the building a monstrosity and despised its flamboyant style. It became a symbol. With five hundred rooms, the Fontainebleau was double the size of any existing hotel on the Beach. Indeed, it caused problems for a number of smaller hotels in the deco district. Such is the backdrop to Hole in the Head, a movie from the 1950s in which Frank Sinatra plays a struggling small hotel owner on Ocean Boulevard who tries to connect with the tycoons who hang out in the Fontainebleau. Lapidus also designed one of the first outdoor pedestrian malls in the country: Lincoln Road was converted from a heavy-traffic artery into a shopping way for pedestrians in 1960 and promoted as the “Fifth Avenue of the South.”

In the course of the 1940s and 1950s, Miami Beach’s clientele started to diversify. Besides its customary niche for the rich leisure classes from up north, it began to attract middle-income residents and tourists, northern retirees of more modest means, and Cuban visitors. For a growing number of upper-middle-class Cubans, a vacation in South Florida became a yearly event; for the wealthy, daily shopping trips to Miami were not uncommon. Many of the new residents settled in South Beach, the area roughly equivalent with the deco district. Despite the gradual introduction of air conditioning in the 1950s, the large majority of wintertime people on the Beach were snowbirds. In 1952, for example, the winter population of Miami Beach swelled to about 200,000 while the summer population stood at 45,541 residents.³² The growing Jewish population on the Beach maintained a seasonal character well into the 1950s: “The constant influx of a great number of visitors gave a special character to local Jewish institutions. The synagogues have the highest rate of ‘out-of-town’ attendance in the nation.”³³

South Florida, and particularly Miami Beach, also continued to be a magnet to organized crime. By the late 1940s, the area was firmly embedded in Mafia networks centered in Chicago and New York, making it the “winter gangster capital of the world.”³⁴ In 1947, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover remarked, “If you put a dragnet around Twenty-third and Collins, and slapped every mobster you caught into jail for life, you’d end organized crime in America.”³⁵ Big mob names from this era include Hymie “Loudmouth” Levin and Jack “Greasy Thumb” Guzik. Miami’s appeal consisted of the weather, beaches, wealthy patrons, lots of entertainment, the absence of state taxes, and relaxed policing.

Since the end of Prohibition, the main focus of organized crime was on gambling. Some of it was legal, as at the Hialeah racetrack, but most of it was not—there was also much irregular gambling at Hialeah Park and at the dog races. Lottery games, such as Cuban bolitas, targeted people with lower incomes. Miami, Hialeah, Fort Lauderdale, and Hollywood had well-known gambling parlors, but most of the action was on the Beach. Much of the racketeering money was spent lavishly on alcohol, food, women, cars, and entertainment. The Mafia also used its financial prowess to influence elections and public opinion, and to bribe officials. Considerable funds were plowed back into real estate, hotels, industries, and sports.³⁶ Miami Beach hotels owned or controlled by the Mafia around this time included the Wofford, the Boulevard, the Roney, the Grand, and the Sands.

In 1950, the U.S. Senate appointed the Greater Miami Crime Commission, chaired by Senator Estes Kefauver, to investigate the escalation of organized crime in Greater Miami. The committee conducted hearings in Dade and Broward counties and reported in detail on key figures, places, practices, and networks. Kefauver branded Miami as a “plunder-ground … for America’s most vicious criminals.”³⁷ The committee’s work received lots of publicity but it did not stop the Mafia from extending its activities.

One of the leading figures during the 1950s was Meyer Lansky. Born in Russia, he migrated to New York as a child and grew up with the mob. He first visited Miami in 1936 and brought the New York Jewish Mafia along with him. Lansky was known as the chairman of the board of the National Crime Syndicate, one of the biggest criminal organizations of the 1940s and 1950s. The syndicate had close ties to the Cosa Nostra and maintained operations in New York, Las Vegas, Miami, and Havana.³⁸ Lansky set up gambling halls across South Florida but especially in Fort Lauderdale, where the competition was less. Many big hotels on the Beach, such as the Fontainebleau and the Singapore, were owned or controlled by the Minneapolis Group, one of Lansky’s corporate fronts. Lansky was one of the most successful mobsters ever. He brilliantly mixed illegal earnings with legal activities and lived a quiet private life. Lansky’s name is inscribed as a benefactor in one of the stained-glass windows of the Synagogue on Third Street. He died at the age of eight-one, in 1983, and never went to jail.

To add to the mix, in the 1950s Miami was “the underground capital-in-exile for the plotters of revolution in the Caribbean and throughout Latin America” with gunrunning as a major industry.³⁹ In the slightly hyperbolic words of the mob expert and author Hank Messick, Miami was “very much like Casablanca in the forties—a city full of stateless men and women, soldiers of fortune, spies and secret agents, con men of all persuasions, and even a few patriots.”⁴⁰ The most important group of “plotters” was the Cuban exile community that opposed the Batista regime. The Caribbean island, only ninety miles across the southern waters, was about to resume its historical role in the shaping of Miami, and it would do so in dramatic fashion.