For Sale —American Paradise

by Willie Drye

  It was Saturday, September 18, 1926. The horrifying experience of riding out the worst hurricane on record had left him so dazed that he questioned his own lucidity.

  “I’m not normal,” he wrote. “I’m not sure that I’m perfectly sane.”

  Still, he continued to scribble hastily, wanting to get something on paper before he collapsed from exhaustion—or lost his mind. At the moment, both possibilities seemed likely.

  Steadying himself, he continued.

  “I must set this down now,” he wrote, “for I’m not sure how long my reason will last. My God, but I’m tired. I’ll write it now while every minute’s horror of those unforgettable ten hours stands out in my brain like a year in an inferno.”

  Until you’ve been through an intense hurricane, it’s impossible to really understand the unearthly power they can unleash and the primal fear they can evoke. Inexperienced human perception and anticipation inevitably tend to underestimate a hurricane’s fearsome force.

  After you’ve survived such a storm, you may never be the same again.

  Meteorologists in the twenty-first century are still trying to understand these storms and calculate the immense energy they release. Today, their power sometimes is expressed in a measure that did not exist in 1926—atomic bombs. When a hurricane reaches its peak intensity, it may release energy equivalent to 500,000 Hiroshima-type atomic bombs, although that energy is spread over a vast area and is not concentrated as it would be in an atomic bomb explosion.

  As Reardon gathered his wits and his strength in a damp hotel room and tried to write about a life-altering experience, thousands of dazed and terrified people crawled and pushed and wormed their way out of the wreckage in Miami and Miami Beach, Fort Lauderdale and Hialeah, and Hollywood and Coconut Grove. Others, too seriously injured to move, lay helplessly where they’d fallen, waiting, hoping someone would find them soon.

  The wail of ambulance sirens replaced the wailing screech of the hurricane’s winds. Mothers searched frantically for missing children. Husbands sick with worry, exhausted but driven by dread and determination to find their loved ones, tore at piles of tangled lumber that only a few hours earlier had served as the walls and floors of their dream homes, searching frantically for family members. Children sought missing pets—or their parents.

  Some survivors wept over the lifeless bodies of loved ones, or just wandered the streets, thirsty and in a state of shock, looking for water or a familiar face.

  The iconic decorative touches of a tropical paradise that had existed a day earlier—Cuban tiles, stucco walls, colorful sun-bleached awnings—had been turned into mounds of twisted rubble, on top of which lay shreds of clothing, pieces of furniture, fragments of dishes, remains of cherished heirlooms . . . the deeply personal wreckage of private lives. And beneath those piles, and in flood-waters, and in wrecked cars and boats, the dead lay, awaiting discovery and identification. Some had been crushed when buildings had collapsed. Others had been speared or clubbed by debris that became deadly when it was propelled by winds that may have reached 150 miles an hour in the northeast quadrant of the eye wall. Even a coconut, that ubiquitous symbol of the tropics, could knock the life out of someone when it flew through the air at that speed.

  Some victims had simply drowned when the ocean surged across Miami Beach and into the streets of downtown Miami.

  The raucous, deadly sea had also flung boats and ships of all sizes out of the water. About 550 vessels—modest houseboats, barges, sturdy tugs, sleek yachts, oceangoing freighters, and small rowboats—were wrecked or sunk in the Miami River and Biscayne Bay. The bowsprit of the Rose Mahoney, a proud, five-masted schooner washed ashore by the storm, towered over Biscayne Boulevard.

  The storm had wrecked and demolished the pleasure spots of Miami Beach. Mixed in with the other wreckage on the western shore of Biscayne Bay were chunks of polished maple boards that had been part of the dance floor of Charley’s Grill. Only a few hours earlier, dancers had been doing the Charleston on those boards until cops had come in, closed the place, and told everyone to get off the island. The storm’s tides and winds had carried the boards about three miles across Biscayne Bay.

  Near the Flagler Street bridge, fifty-four boats had been piled up in the Miami River. An eighteen-foot pleasure boat rested on its keel near the curb at a street corner, far from any water. It looked as though the owner had left it in a choice parking space and gone shopping.

  In downtown Miami, the seventeen-story Meyer-Kiser Building—also known as the Dade Commonwealth Building—was ruined. The building’s opening only a few months earlier had prompted Miami’s boomers to boast that their skyline of tall buildings reaching for the clouds would soon resemble New York’s.

  But the Meyer-Kiser’s upper stories had been blasted by winds even more powerful than those that had caused so much havoc on the ground. At ground level, a hurricane’s winds interact with the ground and are slowed down, but one hundred or more feet in the air, the winds are unimpeded by the ground’s drag. This means that the winds that slammed into the Meyer-Kiser Building could have exceeded 160 miles an hour.

  “Jack Reeves tells me he watched the antics of this seventeen-story building from the door of the Ritz Hotel,” Leo Reardon wrote. “He says it waved its tail like a porpoise and did a sort of Charleston during the gale.”

  The building’s structural steel was so twisted by the fierce winds that the building’s upper floors could not be repaired. Instead, they would have to be torn down, and the Meyer-Kiser Building—which still stands in downtown Miami—would be reduced to five stories.

  In the Glades northwest of Miami, an Atlantic Coast Line rescue train steamed from Sebring toward Moore Haven. No one had heard anything from the little lakeside hamlet since Saturday morning, when the town’s telegraph operator reported that water was knee-deep and rising in the train station.

  Around eight p.m. on Saturday, the train had to stop in Palmdale, about seventeen miles from Moore Haven, to take on water for the locomotive’s boiler. Because the storm had ripped away part of the water tank’s structure, the crew had to rig a trough from the tank to the locomotive to fill the boiler. It took hours to complete the task.

  Around eleven p.m., the train resumed its journey. The track was surrounded by floodwaters, so crewmen ran a handcar ahead of the train to make sure the track was safe. It was slow going.

  A few miles outside Palmdale, the train crew met fifteen storm refugees seeking shelter. They took them aboard and pushed on. A mile or so farther along, the track was completely underwater and impassable for the locomotive and train. So the crewmen abandoned the train, climbed onto the small handcar, and continued.

  “The wind was still blowing a gale,” The Times of Hammond, Indiana, reported. “The track was generally out of sight, and frequently at an acute angle. At other places, the fill was washed from under the track, which hung like a suspended bridge, held together only by bolts and fish plates.

  “Still these five railroad men proceeded through the inky black night.”

  Around three a.m., the train crew reached Newhall, a tiny community about three and a half miles from Moore Haven. Here, the train tracks were just gone. The men climbed down off the handcar and started slogging through floodwaters toward Moore Haven.

  The rescue party reached Moore Haven around sunup on Sunday morning. They found a nearly destroyed town covered in knee-deep water. Some of the storm survivors were crowded onto the second floors of the few buildings that had remained intact. Others had climbed into train cars that had been parked on a railroad siding.

  The rescue party found usable boats and started loading survivors into them, then rowed the boats back to Newhall, where the survivors were put aboard the train and taken to safety. Meanwhile, other trains were sent to Muckway, another tiny railroad settlement near Moore Haven. Eventually, around 1,200 people were evacuated from Moore Haven.

  In Miami, ambulances still sped along Biscayne Boulevard Sunday morning,
and rescue workers were pulling corpses from the rubble.

  Wild rumors of apocalyptic death and destruction were circulating. “Reports have it Miami Beach has been washed completely away and the dead are decomposing in piles of thousands,” Leo Reardon wrote in his hotel room.

  The rumor mill that follows any catastrophic event was cranking out reports that Fort Lauderdale supposedly was scrubbed clean of buildings, and thousands were dead there. Hialeah reportedly looked as though it had been shelled by the gigantic artillery the Germans had used in the Great War.

  There was no reason to doubt these tales because funeral homes were filling up with corpses, and every moment more were being brought in.

  Across the nation, Americans were pouring their morning coffee and opening their Sunday newspapers to screaming headlines of unimaginable catastrophe in Florida.

  “Miami Wiped Out by Terrific Gale,” said the Salt Lake Tribune in Utah.

  In Florence, South Carolina, readers of an “extra” edition of the Morning News Review saw a headline saying that one thousand had been killed, and “Noted Resort Cities Laid Waste by Most Destructive Storm In Memory.”

  In Pennsylvania, subscribers to the Clearfield Progress read: “Beautiful Florida Coastal Cities Levelled by Hurricane / Nearly 1,000 Lives Lost.”

  In Texas, editors at the Galveston County Daily News put out an “extra” edition with a huge banner headline reading “Many Die; Cities Razed.”

  According to headlines in the Chester Times of Pennsylvania, “1,000 Dead, 50,000 Homeless / $100,000,000 Loss in Storm that Hits Florida Cities / Miami Is Devastated, with Many Buildings in Ruins in Hollywood, Coral Gables, and Nearby Places.”

  In Fort Lauderdale—one of the cities supposedly wiped off the map, according to headlines in other parts of the nation—the Daily News somehow published a Sunday edition with the headline “Hurricane Claims Heavy Toll of Life and Property.”

  The New York Times was more reserved. On Sunday morning, they reported that seventy-five were known dead in Miami and two thousand buildings had been destroyed. They noted that “scant details” were available, but said the storm was being called the “worst in history.”

  By late Sunday afternoon, American Red Cross officials in Florida and Washington, DC, were trying to get a handle on the hurricane’s devastation. Around 5:30 p.m., a Western Union delivery boy handed a telegram to J. Arthur Jeffers, a Red Cross administrator in Washington. It was from Henry Reed in Jacksonville, and it was alarming. Reed reported that a passenger agent for the Florida East Coast Railway had told him that more than 700 people had been killed and 38,000 were homeless.

  A few minutes later, another telegram arrived from Red Cross representative Sidney Morse in Fort Pierce: “South Florida in misery and grave danger.”

  “Suffering terrible,” Morse said. “Need food, water, doctors, nurses, and financial help immediately.”

  When the sun came up over the Gulf of Mexico on Monday, September 20, the hurricane’s eye was just south of Pensacola at the western tip of the Florida Panhandle. And although the storm had weakened some, it was still inflicting a terrible beating on that old city. A storm surge that reached fourteen feet at some points devastated Pensacola Bay. A steady wind of 100 mph blew for five hours, and hurricane-force winds of at least 74 mph blew for twenty-four hours. Amazingly, no one was killed in Pensacola.

  The storm’s eye pushed inland at Gulf Shores, Alabama, just west of Pensacola, and continued westward, crossing Mississippi and finally dissipating over Louisiana.

  Monday morning’s newspapers continued to paint a portrait of death and devastation in South Florida, including “1,000 Perish in Florida Twister,” a headline from the Charleston Gazette in West Virginia’s capital city.

  In Utah, the Salt Lake Tribune reported “Hurricane Levels Florida Coast Cities,” killing 1,075 in the process.

  The New York Times dropped the restraint it had used in the previous day’s newspaper, reporting that a sixty-mile stretch of coastline from Miami northward had been “devastated” by the hurricane, killing one thousand. Miami was “laid waste” by the storm, and “vast damage” had been inflicted on Hollywood.

  A headline in the Chester Times said the storm had left fifty thousand homeless.

  Many of the newspaper stories cited injury and damage estimates from the American Red Cross. Some very wealthy and powerful men who were heavily invested in Florida were reading those stories. They were seething at this portrayal of slaughter and devastation, and gripped by the fear that unless they stopped it, all of the millions they’d spent turning Florida into a paradise on Earth would be wiped out.

  The residents of Miami and neighboring communities were just beginning to realize the full extent of the devastation caused by the hurricane. Exactly how devastating that storm was would be debated for weeks—and years—after it struck. For the record, the official death toll has been calculated as at least 372, although about 800 people—most of them African Americans—were missing and never seen again after the storm. About 25,000 people were left homeless, and damages by the storm were calculated at about $100 million, or more than $1.3 billion in twenty-first-century dollars.

  “The city is waking to the horrors of the disaster,” Leo Reardon wrote on Monday, September 20, 1926. “All of yesterday there was a spirit of hysterical joking, except among those actively engaged in relief work.”

  The survivors were joking, perhaps, because they didn’t know how badly their communities had been hit. Telephones and telegraphs were gone for the time being. Newspapers were struggling to repair damages and resume publishing.

  “Details were not to be had; none yet knew the facts,” Reardon said.

  And one newspaper whose responsibility was to report the facts was deliberately obscuring them. In its edition of September 20, the Miami Herald reported that the storm had caused about $10 million in damages to that city, and that total damages in neighboring communities “will not exceed $1 million.”

  It was an absurdly low figure, and it started a determined effort by the city’s business interests to underplay the hurricane’s destruction.

  Reardon drove to the causeway to see how Miami Beach had fared. The causeway had been closed. He had to show identification and a press pass, and promise police that he’d return before dark.

  What he saw was stunning.

  “My first view of the storm’s ravages at America’s Playground brought tears to my eyes,” he said.

  A yacht had been smashed against the causeway and ruined. Two feet of sand covered Ocean Drive. The palace-like homes of the wealthy had withstood the storm but were heavily damaged, with broken windows and water-soaked contents. Some were missing roofs.

  Hotels—the Mayflower, the Boulevard, the Flamingo—were smashed open and their contents scattered for blocks. Dead fish lay decaying in the hot sun.

  The storm had done its worst work at South Beach. Casinos and nightclubs simply were no more, and some of their revelers had ignored police warnings to get off the island. “They are pulling out the dead from the ruins of the casinos and shops,” Reardon wrote. “The number will never be known.”

  Carl Fisher’s famous Roney Plaza Hotel was heavily damaged by winds and storm surge. “So clean was the sweep of the torrent through the ground floor of the Roney Plaza Hotel that not a tittle of testimony remains, that only two days ago there were here dozens of smart shops, beauty parlors, and drugstores,” Reardon wrote.

  The Roney’s roof also was gone, and most of its windows were broken.

  Familiar landmarks had just disappeared. “Collins Avenue is a pathetic thoroughfare,” Reardon said. “I have lived in Miami and Miami Beach three years, but had difficulty in knowing when we had arrived at the corner of Collins Avenue and Lincoln Road.”

  In Washington, DC, President Calvin Coolidge had heard enough about the hurricane’s damage to issue a statement calling for Americans to make generous contributions to relieve the suffering in Florida.r />
  “An overwhelming disaster has come to the people of Miami, Hollywood, and surrounding communities in Southern Florida,” his statement began.

  Coolidge said he would authorize federal assistance to help those hardest hit by the storm, “but realizing the great suffering which now needs relief and will need relief for days to come, I am prompted to appeal urgently to the American people . . . to contribute generously in aiding the sufferers of this disaster.”

  Coolidge ended his statement by urging Americans to send contributions to the Red Cross, which would use their contributions “in the most effective manner” to help those who needed it.

  Immediately after the president had released his statement, Red Cross chairman John Barton Payne—who had served as secretary of the interior under President Woodrow Wilson—sent a memo to local Red Cross leaders across the country. Coolidge’s statement made the Red Cross responsible for the recovery effort in South Florida, Payne said. Local Red Cross chapters should make sure Coolidge’s statement was well publicized and immediately start raising money for the hurricane victims.

  By late Monday afternoon, Al Reck, the determined reporter who’d braved the worst of the storm with the fearless taxi driver, had reached West Palm Beach. Along the way he’d gotten a close look at the storm’s devastation and counted seventeen corpses. He sat down in a hotel room and started banging out his story. The man who had been left for dead on a battlefield in France had been awed by this hurricane.

  “I never experienced anything like it and I hope I never will again,” he wrote.

  Hialeah and its famous dog track and kennel club were destroyed, Reck reported. Hollywood would have to be entirely rebuilt, he said.

  While Reck wrote his story in West Palm Beach, A. T. Philips in Miami was composing a telegram to New York City. Philips was the manager of the Miami office of the George A. Fuller Company. The company, founded in 1882 by the architect often credited with “inventing” the skyscraper, had built a half-dozen or so prominent buildings in Miami during the boom years.