The following program is a production of WLRN Public Television. Sailing from Key West in 1870, Henry Lum and his son Charles saw coconut palms swaying on what is now Miami Beach. They bought land from the federal government for 25 cents an acre and built the beach's first home. It was a barrier peninsula, not even an island.
Not until the early 1920s, when a cut was made at Baker's Allover. It had tall mangroves on the bay side. The interior was concave and it collected a lot of water.
There were mangroves in the interior. It was a swamp. And the ocean side was a windswept beach. And it needed a lot of work to make it what it became.
The beach itself was almost deserted, a place where early Miamians could enjoy the Atlantic Ocean. Their ferry boat service came off of today's Flagler Street on the bayfront. And we take a right over here. You would disembark from this ferry boat on the bay side, southern tip, and you'd walk across this wood frame ramp through a jungle over to the ocean side.
The Lumms tried to farm coconuts, but the plantation failed when wind and rats destroyed the young trees. So it was kind of a forewarned, godforsaken experiment. A New Jersey pioneer named John Collins bought the property. He had a better idea than coconuts and planted exotic produce like mangoes, tomatoes and avocados. Collins set about taming the swamp, clearing its mangroves and its rats.
He planted an avocado orchard that straddled today's Arthur Godfrey Road. He planted these Australian pine trees. They're very fast growing. They're very shallow rooted. It has wind blocks.
Many of those trees, in fact, are on Pine Tree Drive today. A canal was cut to move the crops across the peninsula to a ferry that connected it to the mainland port of Miami across Biscayne Bay. There, the railroad built by industrialist Henry Flagler took the produce north. His southbound trains brought tourists and settlers looking for a slice of a new tropical paradise.
Miami was already a going city by this time. Miami in 1910 had 5,500 people. This was now the age of the automobile, and it would bring with it another moment with a vision to transform Miami Beach into the playground of today. Carl Fisher was an auto parts mogul from Indiana. He made the first practical automobile headlights, then sold the company for a fortune.
Self-made, a daredevil, a great visionary. One of the more incredible stories in the America of the early 20th century. By the time he's 23 or 24, he's got the biggest car dealership in Indianapolis, which was an important car center at that time.
Fisher loved to be behind the wheel, and he built a speedway in Indianapolis to race cars. He laid a lot of money on that track. He put down a wood base, and that thing just kind of flew all over the place, and there were accidents galore.
He was mortified. In fact, the first race was unsuccessful, and he came back within a year and built this good masonry base for it. Bricks. Race fans dubbed it the Brickyard.
Fisher, a born salesman, proclaimed it the most spectacular sports event in the world. At the time, most paved roads petered out to dirt tracks at the edge of towns. Fisher persuaded automakers like Henry Ford to finance the first major highway, the Lincoln Highway, from New York to San Francisco. It went to areas that had never before seen a road, period.
And he understood that the car was going to transform transportation and American industry. But before it could do that, you needed roads. So let's link this country. Next, he turned his eyes south, where paradise beckoned, if only motorists could get there. It's all about tourism.
The tourist center of Florida, prior to Miami becoming a city in 1896, was Jacksonville-St. Augustine. But by the early 1900s, it's clearly...
Miami's South Florida. Within two more years, Fisher had built the Dixie Highway, opening the floodgates to sunseekers and investors from the industrial north. It was a subscription road.
If a city wanted it, you had to pay part of the cost of constructing that road. And it's today's northeast, southeast second avenue, right in the heart of Miami. John Collins, meanwhile, had a vision of his own to connect Miami Beach with the mainland by building a road bridge across the bay. But half a mile from completion, he ran out of money.
Fisher stepped in to bankroll the final stretch, and in return he got a 200-acre slice of Collins' land. The Collins Bridge joined Miami Beach with the Venetian Causeway as of today, back behind me, and then the Collins Canal. It runs all the way past the Holocaust Memorial out to an eastern part of today's Miami Beach.
When it opened in 1913, it was the longest wooden bridge in the world. With the land link in place, Fisher could see a golden future. So could the Collins clan, especially the businessman's son-in-law, Thomas Pankhurst. Together with a consortium of Miami bankers led by the Loomis brothers, they began to plan a resort city. These guys combined their companies, Collins, Miami Beach Improvement Company, Fisher, the Alton Beach Realty, the Loomis brothers, the Ocean Beach Realty.
These three companies came together in 1915 and they incorporated as a town. The Collins clan from New Jersey envisioned a southern Atlantic city. Fisher, on the other hand, saw the beach as a winter retreat for the rich and famous.
His vision early on was a place where these Gilded Age princes like himself could have big estates. And many of them were like him. They came out of a hard struggle back then. And now they had money and they were throwing it around.
An army of engineers descended on the beach with heavy equipment to clear the land. even a couple of elephants to help with the heavy lifting. Dredges deepened channels and filled in the swamps.
Then he pumped in bay bottom in order to fill in that concave area and to eliminate the chance of water collecting again. And so now you're ready. You've got the stage.
Fisher built an opulent bayfront hotel, the Flamingo, where the wealthy could stay while their mansions were built. And it was the last word in hotels. I mean, it faced the bay, it had a big park and recreation area east of it. just west of West Avenue at around 14th and 15th Street. The hotel stood where today's Flamingo apartment buildings are.
The hotel's recreational grounds are today's Flamingo Park. The tennis complex of today is Over here were the polo grounds. On Ocean Drive and 22nd Street, he opened his Roman pool and casino.
A bathing casino is a place where you've got a cabana, you usually have a pool, you've got the beach, the waters of the Atlantic Ocean right there, you can get something to eat, something to drink. It's a glorified cabana. The Nautilus, built in 1923-24, where Mount Sinai Medical Center is today, I mean, that was even more spectacular than the Flamingo.
Just east of here. The least of it was a golf course and a polo field. At one time there were more polo fields and golf courses on the beach than schools and churches. Fisher played polo himself.
He was an avid all-round sportsman. But his abiding passion was always speed, and he loved to race boats on Biscayne Bay. When he wasn't racing himself, he could watch the regattas from the grounds of his opulent bayfront mansion.
From its tower, he could view the new resort city as it rose all around him. Fisher was a great showman. Rosie, one of his elephants, joined the sales team. Fisher was a genius at generating publicity.
Rosie caddied for golfers, including President Warren G. Harding. Sometimes she teed it up herself. And that went out all over the country, you know, the Sunday papers and pictures and captions and all, and she was very famous. Fisher advertised Miami Beach as paradise for sale. In the winter of 1918, he put a billboard in Times Square.
That's where you wanted the people to come from, the snowy north with money. Bathing bells added their allure. Buyers flocked south. J.C. Penney bought an estate.
So did tire company magnate Harvey Firestone. Back in 1903, the government had cut a channel through the beach to create better access to the port of Miami. The cut created an island that Carl Fisher... took a liking to and purchased.
And in fact, it still bears his name, Fisher Island. Somewhere along the way, the millionaire William K. Vanderbilt brought his large, fabulous yacht to the island. Fisher saw it, fell in love with it instantly. approached Vanderbilt and said, my island for your boat. And that's the kind of way deals were made in those days.
Collins Avenue became the first paved boulevard running north to south. Fisher cut a swath eastward through the mangroves to build Lincoln Road. Fisher's realty office on Lincoln Road was in this building behind me. Later, it was the site of the Van Dyke Cafe. Fisher would bring prospective buyers of real estate to the penthouse up top.
Look at this bare landscape in front of them and say, see that piece of land over there? That could be yours. A county causeway eventually connected Miami to the beach at 5th Street.
In 1942, it was renamed the MacArthur. Fisher built a trolley car system to complete the mainland link. See, he understood that if you don't have a car, you're going to have to get a ride somehow across there unless you want to swim.
So he's the guy that instituted circa the beginning of the 1920s. A trolley system that was very expensive. Fisher owned his own power plant, later taken over by Florida Power and Light. Because how are you going to sell real estate if you don't have power, or bring tourists down? Everything you needed, he tried to have in place.
The pristine barrier island that had once attracted a passing sailboat had been transformed into a thriving city. The boom reaches peak in the summer of 25, and it was phenomenal. It was the talk of the nation, at least the eastern part of the United States. I mean, land that had been going for nothing was suddenly selling for everything. And building permits were crazy.
And then, for a host of reasons, that boom began to collapse by the latter part of 25, certainly in 26. By June of 26, it's over. Around the same time, nature took its revenge on all this development. The mighty hurricane, September 17th, 18th, just smashed right into Miami Beach, and then it turns west right through downtown Miami, past the northern edges of Coral Gables out into the Everglades.
A lot of people got trapped under the MacArthur Causeway. The causeway was much more narrow then, it wasn't bulk-headed, and that water surge just took them. And its destruction was terrible. There were thousands left homeless, thousands of buildings went down or were damaged.
130 people in Dade County died, and that just ensured that boom wasn't coming back. The crash of 29 brought on the Great Depression and an end to the extravagance of the Roaring Twenties. The timing of the crash couldn't have been worse for Carl Fisher. He was over-invested in his latest scheme to create a northern Miami beach on the eastern tip of Long Island. Stock market crash and that was it.
He lost almost everything. Fisher sold his opulent home. In typical fashion, he quipped that it took too long to get to the front door anyway. And he ended up living in a small apartment somewhere on South Beach. And that's where he passed away.
Alcohol had destroyed his liver. When he died in 1939 at the age of 65, Morners paid tribute to him as one of the great visionaries of his time. They placed a memorial on Alton Road.
There is a little bust of him in a park on Alton Road, and it really attributes to him what it should, that he carved a great city out of a jungle. Sadly, there's little else in Miami Beach that recognizes his tremendous contributions to the city. He's largely a forgotten man.
Fisher himself dismissed the notion that he was a man of vision. He was more into it for the achievement, for the challenge. He preferred to say... that he was just a guy who liked to see the dirt fly. No questions, honey.
I'll be the best friend you ever had. I try to be good, but I'm only good at being bad.