Paradise for Sale

by Nick Wynne

  By the beginning of the twentieth century, technological innovations combined to make the marketing of Florida a resounding success. Photography, which had evolved from the cumbersome process of glass negatives and static subjects, now offered quick processing and the ability to take action photographs. Hand painting also brought a sense of excitement to the products of the photographers’ eyes. In addition, photographers had pioneered ways in which photographs could be “doctored” to remove unwanted objects or to add new features. Fully adhering to the adage that “a picture is worth a thousand words,” these modern-day Rembrandts set about to create idyllic pictures of a Florida with clear blue skies, azure water, pristine beaches and lush tropical landscapes. Professional public relations firms in large metropolitan areas produced effective advertisements, and scores of local imitators copied their style and churned out their own versions of these ads.

  New developments in printing made it possible to reproduce these colored images by the millions, along with the bright, eye-catching graphics generated by thousands of commercial artists. Utilizing the new schools of art nouveau and art deco design, they produced countless brochures, maps, postcards, labels and letterheads that featured idealized landscapes, resort hotels, farms and housing developments. These materials reminded recipients that Florida was beautiful, fun, affordable and the destination of choice of millions of “in” people. Hyperbole ruled the day, and the general operating principle of ad writers was to exaggerate the positive and ignore the negative. As the twentieth century progressed, depictions of bathing beauties, golfers in their knickers and visitors exploring under a cloudless sky reinforced these elements. If these ads were the only available source of information about the Sunshine State, the reader would be forced to believe that it never rained in Florida, that every person in the state wore a perpetual smile and that orange trees and palm trees lined every road and filled every yard. A leading newspaper, the St. Petersburg Evening Independent, went so far as to promise a free newspaper to every subscriber on the days it rained.

  The rapid adoption of the automobile as the primary mode of travel in the United States by the 1920s also accelerated the merchandising of the Sunshine State. The need for maps and the rise of tourist attractions such as Bok Tower, Silver Springs and McKee Gardens provided new fodder for new ads. Hundreds of mom and pop roadside motels and fruit stands were opened to take advantage of the new automobile tourists, who left the well-known paths along rivers and railroads to head into the interior of the peninsula. Once again, the local entrepreneurs found that the professionally produced advertisements of the larger resorts could be modified cheaply and easily to fit their businesses.

  By the 1920s, the widespread use of color in advertising brochures had attracted the attention of tourists and potential home buyers to the wonders of Florida. The use of bathing beauties in scanty (for the period) swimsuits offered hints of exotic adventures. Courtesy of the Florida Historical Society.

  Automobiles not only increased the number of tourists in Florida, but their ability to traverse the entirety of the peninsula also spurred the development of an aggressive and nonstop building boom in the early 1920s. Across the Florida landscape, individuals like George Merrick, D.P. “Doc” Davis, Carl Fisher and numerous other smaller developers bought large parcels of land and subdivided them into smaller parcels for homes. Deliberately drawing a comparison with the sunny climate of the Mediterranean, these developers hired nationally known architects to recreate the tiled roofs, archways and patios of Spanish and Italian villas in Miami, Boca Raton, Vero Beach and Tampa. Some developers, like Addison Mizner, designed their own homes without the benefit of formal training as architects. What was popular in the larger cities soon found its way to the smaller towns and villages. Only the North Florida cities of Jacksonville and Tallahassee appeared to escape this mania for the Mediterranean, and perhaps that was because they were geographically more identified with the Old South states of Georgia and Alabama than they were with lower Florida.

  Although the boom of the early 1920s came to a screeching halt in 1926–27, the collapse of the era of rapid building was neither absolute nor permanent. Even as the rest of America settled into a severe depression after the stock market crash of 1929, many of America’s wealthiest families and a significant number of the middle class managed to weather the crash with most, if not all, of their assets in place. The distress of small farmers and small businessmen had little effect on their incomes. Throughout the 1930s, a few Florida developers continued to build hotels and large homes for these elites. Miami Beach, which has seen a revival in its economic fortunes during the last two decades, continued to be a favorite watering hole for them. South Beach’s famous art deco and art moderne hotels were constructed during the Depression, and hoteliers had little difficulty in keeping their rooms filled.

  Even in the depths of the Depression, Floridians believed that the cure for whatever economic woes the state faced could be solved by ratcheting up their advertising efforts. If advertising selling the Sunshine State worked in good times, they reasoned, more of it should work in hard times. To a certain extent, this reasoning was correct. Large cities, already known for their playground atmospheres and whose names carried a certain social imprimatur, did survive and even mildly prospered. Smaller cities were less fortunate and weathered the Depression at a subsistence level. Small developers like Cocoa Beach’s Gus Edwards were forced to put their plans on hold to await better economic conditions. Even through this wait, prolonged by the outbreak of World War II, their plans continued to percolate on the back burner. In Edwards’s case, his grandiose plans for Cocoa Beach did not come to fruition until the late 1950s and the advent of the space race. Today, the observant traveler in Florida’s backcountry areas can find entire towns with streets paved and utilities in place but no houses. Some are the products of the ’20s bust, while others were built during the anticipated boom of the 1950s. Most are out of the way, with little in the way of amenities to attract settlers, and many are tied up in court battles that seem to drag on endlessly.

  From its earliest days as a Spanish colony through the present, Florida has attracted the attention of many people, and much of this attention has been generated through the creation and distribution of advertisements tailored to selling the possibilities of the peninsula. The success of these efforts can readily be seen by the astronomical growth of the state’s population. From a mere 1.5 million permanent residents in 1950, Florida now has more than 18.5 million citizens. Despite a growing shortage of potable water and a rapidly declining amount of buildable acreage, the “selling” machines of Florida have been in existence for so long that no one knows how to stop them. Politicians who depend on continued growth as a mark of good leadership have little or no interest in developing a rational alternative to continued unregulated growth.

  Today, more than 85 million tourists visit the Sunshine State each year, brought here by advertisements placed in every possible media outlet. Governments at all levels—state, county and municipal—annually spend millions of dollars to increase the number of visitors. Each of Florida’s sixty-seven counties has a tourist development board with special taxing powers that generate the dollars spent to extol the opportunities of that county. No citizen is even surprised when tourist officials make trips to Europe and the Far East to recruit more visitors. Neither are they surprised when government leaders offer tax exemptions and free land to companies willing to locate in the Sunshine State.

  It was all about selling, and success is all about numbers.

  CHAPTER 2

  Priming the Pump

  Lotus land invaded by reality and still retaining its languorous atmosphere—that’s Florida…Florida represents the fruition of America’s dream for a playground.

  —William Ullman, American Motorist, October 1926

  When the twentieth century dawned, Florida was enjoying a mini-boom in land purchases. Caught up in the fervor of the Plant-Flagler railroad ex
pansion of the previous two decades and the rise of resort hotels that catered to the super-rich, investors—attracted by the prospect of so much money in so few cities—flocked to places like Miami, Jacksonville, Tampa and Palm Beach. Other investors, seeing the possibilities of great financial returns for farming and industrial ventures, purchased huge swaths of Florida lands and experimented with a variety of truck crops, mining operations and utopian communities. Here and there, in places like Miami and Sarasota, other entrepreneurs platted their holdings and offered homesteads for sale. Almost exclusively, however, the emphasis was placed on attracting wealthy buyers, who would spend a few winter months each year enjoying the sunshine, playing a few rounds of golf or games of tennis, bathing in community pools and taking in the natural flora and fauna that abounded in Florida.

  In Palm Beach, for example, wealthy visitors who arrived in private railway cars or by luxurious yachts stayed at Flagler’s luxury hotels, where, surrounded by the “right kind” of people, they could flagrantly display their wealth and compare net worth with one another. Unlike Newport, Rhode Island, where large mansions were built as summer homes for the ultra-wealthy of the nineteenth century, Palm Beach was a “hotel civilization,” which served as an outpost for the nation’s richest families, Ward McAllister’s “Four Hundred.” Flagler’s aim was to provide all of the possible recreation activities a guest could ever want within the boundaries of the hotel property. Days were spent fishing, cycling, golfing and playing tennis and croquet, while men and women both frequently practiced their marksmanship on the various sea birds that filled the sky. Tame pigeons, freed from their cages, presented predictable targets for avid shooters during organized “hunts.” Despite the variety of activities available to the more active visitors, David Paul “Doc” Davis, who gained fame as the developer of Davis Islands in Tampa during the early 1920s, referred to the Palm Beach lifestyle as sedentary and for old people. His assessment was right on target, simply because many of the fortunes on exhibit in Palm Beach had taken decades to establish.

  Initially, Palm Beach, unlike Newport, was open to anyone who could afford the high prices charged for extended stays at the Breakers or the Royal Poinciana hotels. Money—or as one resident wag described it, “filthy lucre”—became the standard for acceptance, and America’s nouveau riche rubbed shoulders with scions of long-established wealth and even European royalty. During the first decade of the twentieth century, many of America’s patent medicine kings found Palm Beach a delightful place to vacation with their families. Alva Johnston, in his book The Legendary Mizners, described how various individuals were referred to by the source of their wealth instead of their given names. Thus, Isaac Emerson, whose Bromo-Seltzer factory in Baltimore produced the “morning after” favorite of inebriates, was most often referred to as “Bromo-Seltzer” Emerson, while Dr. Jonas Kilmer of Binghamton, New York, was popularly called “Swamp Root” after his famous elixir. Truly, Palm Beach operated as a democracy of wealth, a standard that adheres today when such newly rich persons as Donald Trump and Rush Limbaugh can purchase homes there and attain status as members of the social elite.

  In 1896, Henry Flagler extended his railroad, now named the Florida East Coast Railway, to Miami. Devastating freezes in the winter of 1894–95 in Palm Beach caused him to look farther south. Offers of free land from Julia Tuttle and the William Brickell family enticed him to come to Miami, an offer he accepted and which paid untold dividends to the donors. With his arrival in the city, Flagler wasted little time in duplicating the strategy that had proven so profitable in the past. Within a few months, he undertook civic improvements, including dredging a channel to open Biscayne Bay to shipping, building the first water and power systems in the area, constructing streets where none had existed before and starting the city’s first newspaper, the Miami Metropolis. Flagler’s arrival turned a small village into a viable town, and though gratified at the offer, he refused to have the town named in his honor when it was incorporated in 1896. In 1897, he opened the exclusive Royal Palm Hotel, which stretched 680 feet along the shore of the Miami River and featured a number of firsts for the city—the first electric lights, the first elevator and the first swimming pool.

  Henry Morrison Flagler, a Standard Oil partner of John D. Rockefeller, visited St. Augustine in 1881 and became enchanted with the prospects of making money on Florida tourism, land sales and his railroad. In 1885, he started construction on the Ponce de León Hotel in the city. By 1896, his enterprises stretched as far south as Miami, and by 1912, Key West, then the largest city in Florida, was connected to the mainland by Flagler rails. Courtesy of the Florida Historical Society.

  Without a doubt, Flagler put Miami on the map. Prior to the coming of the railroad, there was little about it to merit even the distinction of being a village. By 1905, however, Flagler turned his attention southward once again. He set his sights on Key West, the southernmost city in the United States and, at that time, the most populated city in Florida. Accessible only by boat, Key West was connected to Florida by a chain of small cays that stretched 128 miles long and was located in the heart of the hurricane zone.

  By 1900, however, the mere presence of the railroad magnate and hotelier had attracted considerable interest from some of the more established and wealthier citizens of the United States. William Deering, the chairman of the Deering Harvester Company, and his wife, Clara, built a large home in the Coconut Grove section of south Miami. He was soon joined by other members of America’s financial and social elite, and Mary Brickell, now the widow of William Brickell, sold lots to them. Luxurious mansions soon lined Miami’s “Millionaire’s Row,” a visible display of how attractive the town had become.

  Deering’s two sons, James and Charles, soon followed suit and purchased land for homes. James Deering constructed Villa Vizcaya, a massive thirty-four-room Italian Renaissance villa, designed by F. Burrall Hoffman Jr. and Phineas E. Paist (and decorated by Paul Chalfin), encompassing 180 acres, complete with formal gardens, statuary, a small complementary village and fields for grazing livestock and growing produce. Chalfin and Deering toured Europe to purchase furnishings and antiques for the mansion. By 1922, the mansion was complete—and all for the equivalent of $60 million in today’s dollars.

  Charles Deering, who became the first chairman of the International Harvester Company when Deering Harvester merged with McCormick Harvester Company in 1902, was an avid naturalist and art patron. His 444-acre estate, which initially incorporated the older Richmond Inn as the principal residence but later included the Stone House (built in 1922), was larger than Vizcaya but never as opulent. Both brothers were art collectors whose massive collections were worth millions at their deaths.

  Villa Vizcaya, built by James Deering, sat on 180 acres of prime Miami real estate. Built for an estimated $60 million in today’s dollars, this opulent mansion and its bachelor owner hosted a number of prominent celebrities when it was completed in 1922. Courtesy of the Florida Historical Society.

  The Deering family was the most prominent of the wealthy northerners to build in Miami before World War I, but they were not the only family to do so. A small but thriving real estate business added to the prosperity of the city as more and more moneyed individuals built winter homes there.

  Slightly north of downtown Miami, John Collins, an agricultural pioneer, owned a large mangrove island where he managed to grow a considerable crop of avocados. In 1913, unable to depend on boats to take his crop to waiting ships in Biscayne Bay, he began construction of a narrow wooden bridge to connect his island to the mainland. When the bridge was about three-quarters finished, Collins ran out of money. Carl Fisher, who was visiting the city on his much-delayed honeymoon flush with $5 million he had recently gotten from the sale of his famous Prest-O-Lite company, which manufactured gas-powered headlights for automobiles, somehow met him (the stories of how the meeting came about vary from source to source) and advanced him $50,000 to complete the bridge. In exchange, Fisher receiv
ed a one-mile-long strip of land, six hundred yards wide, that fronted on the Atlantic Ocean. He also purchased additional acreage immediately behind the frontage parcels.

  The Collins Bridge, completed with a $50,000 loan from Carl Fisher, opened a mangrove island to development. With Fisher’s vision and money, this island eventually became the posh resort of Miami Beach. Courtesy of the Florida Historical Society.

  Carl Fisher, an entrepreneur from Indianapolis, spent millions of dollars to pump ocean sand onto a mangrove island to create Miami Beach, where he wanted to develop an American Riviera. Courtesy of the Historical Association of Southern Florida.

  Dredging sand from the bottom of the ocean, Fisher widened his holdings on Miami Beach and created several artificial islands for additional homesites. Courtesy of the Florida Historical Society.

  Fisher, who would become synonymous in later years with the city of Miami Beach, was an unlikely investor. Long associated with the automobile industry, he had manufactured Empire cars and pioneered the use of gas-powered headlights, was a leading figure in the movement to build cross-country highways and, most notably, was the major force behind the construction of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Fisher immediately announced that he would invest $5 million to create a new Palm Beach, which he named Miami Beach. To this end, he hired dredges to pump sand from the ocean floor—twenty-four hours a day—onto the mangroves to create new land. After pumping more than six million tons of sand and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to remove the persistent mangrove stumps, he began to lay out his new city. Quickly, other property owners followed suit.