Paradise for Sale

by Nick Wynne

  Derided by Miami real estate promoters, Fisher nevertheless proceeded to clear land, build infrastructure, lay out polo fields and yacht clubs and build a small thirty-two-room hotel, the Lincoln. His objective, he stated to one and all, was to create an American Riviera where wealthy Americans could find all of the attractions and amenities offered by any European resort. Although the United States was initially neutral in the conflict, World War I, which began in 1914 and soon involved most European countries and their colonies, seemed tailor-made to boost Fisher’s plans, since submarine warfare made steamship crossings of the Atlantic Ocean difficult at best. The sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 and the horrific violence of the land war ended the practice of leisurely boarding a steamship, cruising across the ocean for a week to ten days, meandering from capital to capital, visiting historical sites and museums and spending weeks on end at various resorts and spas. While a few intrepid younger persons braved the danger of an ocean voyage, most Americans stayed home. These people made up the market to whom Fisher wanted to sell his land.

  Although he started this project prior to World War I, Fisher’s Miami Beach resort did not become a reality until the 1920s. His first hotel, built in 1916 and named in honor of President Abraham Lincoln, was a modest building of only thirty-two rooms. Courtesy of the Historical Association of Southern Florida.

  Prior to his arrival in Miami, Fisher had been one of the movers and shakers in the effort to build a cross-continent highway to stimulate the automobile industry, since he was a partner in the Empire Automobile Company, an Indiana concern that produced a family car to compete with the cars manufactured by Henry Ford and others in Detroit. Although successful in raising a considerable amount of money and generating the support of communities across the United States, the highway was unfinished when the United States entered World War I. When he acquired land in the Miami area, he also began promoting a major north–south highway that would run from Michigan to Miami. His interest in highway construction coincided with the emerging “Good Roads” movement in the United States and his desire to promote his automotive and development businesses.

  Although he enjoyed some small success in selling land prior to the end of the war, Fisher did not sell enough to recoup his investment. However, the pump was primed.

  Southwest of Miami, another visionary, George Edgar Merrick, was also priming the pump for future development. His father, a well-educated though sickly minister, had purchased a small 160-acre family farm in 1898. The farm, which was called Coral Gables Plantation, produced vegetables for the growing market in Miami and seedlings for the burgeoning citrus market. The venture was profitable enough that George, the eldest child, was sent to Rollins College, although he had never acquired a high school diploma. At Rollins, he did exceptionally well and soon left to study at Columbia University. His academic career was cut short, however, when his father died in 1911 and George returned to manage the family’s holdings. Before his death, Solomon Merrick, George’s father, attempted to attract well-educated and learned friends to the Coral Gables area in an attempt to found a community of scholars. Although only a few friends took him up on the idea, the concept of developing a self-contained community did not die. After he took over the reins of Coral Gables Plantation, George Merrick adopted his father’s vision, but with major changes. Influenced by the City Beautiful movement that swept America following the 1893 Columbian Exposition, the younger Merrick began to entertain the idea of an entirely new city, which would incorporate the latest concepts of city planning and architectural controls. His new bride, Eunice Peacock, whom he married in 1916, shared his vision, but when he approached area bankers about financing to buy additional land, they arbitrarily dismissed him because his proposed new city had no waterfront property and was several miles from Biscayne Bay.

  Momentarily frustrated, the Merricks persisted in their dream. George took a job as a real estate salesman and used his earnings to increase the size of his holdings. By 1919, he had amassed more than sixteen hundred acres that would become the core of his proposed new city in the years that followed. Unlike Fisher, whose Miami Beach was designed to cater to the wealthiest Americans during the winter months, Merrick’s Coral Gables aimed for year-round middle-class residents, whose investments would provide them with permanent residences. In his vision of the perfect city, citizens would be able to take advantage of the sunshine and activities twelve months each year. It was a dream whose time was yet to come.

  In Sarasota, fifty miles south of Tampa, Bertha Palmer, the widow of hotelier and real estate baron Potter Palmer of Chicago, arrived in 1902 to survey property in the area. A small advertisement in the Chicago Sunday Tribune offered large tracts of land “suitable for citrus growing” around Sarasota by Joseph H. Lord and Arthur B. Edwards. Intrigued, she got in touch with Lord, made arrangements to go to Sarasota and eventually wound up purchasing some 140,000 acres of Florida land. Mrs. Palmer utilized some of her vast holdings to grow citrus, which proved very profitable for her, and some to raise cattle, which were hybrids between the descendants of small, wiry Spanish cows and Brahma bulls. Some 7,000 acres were dedicated to Bee Ridge, which was to be a model farm development of 10- to 40-acre farms. This project ended in failure when some early purchasers became dissatisfied and gave up their land, and many of the remaining parcels went unsold. In 1914, on the outskirts of Tampa, Mrs. Palmer purchased a large tract of citrus groves and wild land for use as a hunting preserve—land that would ultimately become the boom-era Temple Terrace development.

  George Edgar Merrick, using the family’s 160-acre plantation as the core of his holdings, gradually acquired more than 1,600 acres to the west of Miami. Influenced by the City Beautiful movement of the early 1900s, he created Coral Gables, a new city with planned streets, family homes and civic attractions—all regulated by rigid zoning restrictions. This is the original family home in Coral Gables. Courtesy of the Historical Association of Southern Florida.

  She devoted other sections of land to development and resale through her firm, the Sarasota-Venice Company. In 1916, Palmer invited a New York firm to develop a plan to make Venice into a “Palm Beach West,” which would feature golfing, hunting, fishing and other activities. She quickly lost interest in the project when the planners asked her to set aside a sizeable portion of her most valuable property for the construction of public-use buildings. Her plans for further development were put on hold when, that same year, she discovered she had incurable cancer. Her death in 1918 ended her schemes. She had profited from her investments in the Sunshine State, however, and the executors for her estate estimated that she had grown her fortune from the $8 million she had inherited from her late husband into almost $20 million, with most of the growth coming from her dealings in Florida land. Although Bertha Palmer was dead before the great boom of the 1920s, she had primed the pump by demonstrating that Florida lands, when purchased at a fair price and developed intelligently, would return considerable profits.

  Bertha Palmer, the eccentric and rich widow of Potter Palmer of Chicago, was attracted to the Sarasota area by an ad in the Chicago Sunday Tribune. When she arrived in 1902, she began to buy up available land. By the time of her death in 1918, she owned more than 140,000 acres. Courtesy of the Florida Historical Society.

  When Bertha Palmer owned Temple Terrace, the family used it for hunting and for growing oranges, but after Maude Fowler and Collins Gillett purchased the property in the early 1920s, it became an exclusive golf community. Courtesy of the Tampa-Hillsborough County Public Library System.

  Palmer’s efforts to develop Sarasota and the surrounding region attracted the attention of other wealthy individuals. In 1911, John Ringling, the great American circus entrepreneur, came to Sarasota. He was so impressed with the prospects for potential development that he persuaded his brother Charles to join him the next year. Soon, John Ringling was joined by other family members who shared his enthusiasm for the area. He amassed more than sixty thousand acres b
y 1917, including several of the small islands that buffered the city from the Gulf of Mexico. Although the attention of most Americans was directed toward the war in Europe, which the United States had joined that year, John Ringling was poised to take the maximum advantage of his investment when peace returned. Once he had decided to put roots down in Sarasota, Ringling and his wife, Mabel, launched a major project to build a mansion suitable for persons of their wealth.

  The efforts of these large prewar developers did not go unnoticed in Florida or the rest of the nation. In many of the smaller towns of the state, men with lesser fortunes began to piece together parcels of land and to plat them into subdivisions. Some, like Cocoa city attorney Gus Edwards, formed a small syndicate of local residents to purchase six hundred acres on the barrier island where present-day Cocoa Beach is located. In central Florida, Charles Hosmer Morse, a wealthy Chicago businessman, purchased a large tract of land in the mid-1890s, when successive freezes destroyed the citrus industry in the region, and began promoting the area as a winter resort for his friends in the North. Quickly constructing several small hotels, he hired the Scottish golf professional John Duncan Dunn to design a nine-hole golf course for his friends to play. By the spring of 1914, Morse’s efforts had become so successful that he closed that course, and he and several friends incorporated the Winter Park Country Club. A new course was laid out and a clubhouse built. Incorporation allowed them to restrict membership and to limit membership to only those persons who were part of their social circle.

  In 1907, citrus pioneer William J. Howey, fresh from Mexico, started new agricultural programs in Polk County, near Winter Haven and Lake Hamilton. In 1914, however, he shifted his operations to Lake County, north of Orlando, and began buying up acreage for the purpose of creating small citrus farms to sell to new residents. By 1917, he owned more than sixty thousand acres and was poised to undertake marketing in a big way. World War I intervened, however, and Howey’s plans had to be scaled back. In 1914, Frederick Ruth, a native of Maryland and an executive with the Alabama Power and Light Company, left the world of business and came to Lake Wales to see what economic opportunities might be found in managing the thirteen hundred acres of open land his late father had purchased in 1883. With two friends, James Mitchell and James Washburn, he created the planned community of Mountain Lake. Once again, the outbreak of the Great War slowed plans for development, although the noted landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. created a master plan for closely regulated growth. The restrictions brought about by the outbreak of war certainly meant disappointment for these developers, but the pump was primed for rapid expansion in the future.

  Circus entrepreneur John Ringling came to Sarasota in 1911, and by 1917, he owned more than sixty thousand acres of raw land. Courtesy of the Florida Historical Society.

  By the early 1920s, John and Mabel Ringling were social and financial leaders in the small town of Sarasota. They built an opulent mansion, Cà d’Zan, which mirrored the style of James Deering’s Vizcaya in Miami. Although John’s brother Charles also built a mansion, it could not compare with Cà d’Zan. Courtesy of the Florida Historical Society.

  In other parts of Florida, other wealthy investors claimed their share of the Sunshine State. In 1919, three Cleveland, Ohio residents—Dr. J.P. Sawyer, Edgar Strong and Dr. W.H. Humiston—purchased 160 acres of land on the barrier island directly across the Indian River Lagoon from the small mainland community of Vero. Separated by the Indian River from the mainland, the property, first known as Southern Dunes, would become one of the most exclusive enclaves in the Sunshine State, restricted to families that met the social and financial standards of the original founders. The founders quickly began to build large homes—most without kitchens—in the development. Residents took their meals at the clubhouse, which was completed in 1919. A few years later Arthur McKee, a prominent local promoter, was the first guest to stay in the clubhouse and built the first home in the development in 1919. Six additional homes were soon finished. Among the first homes constructed that year was “Orchid Oaks,” built by New York attorney Winchester Fitch, who suggested that the community’s name be changed from Southern Dunes to the Riomar Country Club, a combination of the Spanish words for river and sea.

  On the west coast, Ransom E. Olds, a major automobile manufacturer, purchased 37,541 acres of land in Pinellas County in 1913. Olds set out to establish a farming community for workers who retired from his factories. Although Olds sold his development to Harold Prettyman in 1923, his vision of a town based on small-scale model farms continued to prosper until the latter years of that decade.

  Despite the rapid growth of small and exclusive developments in the Sunshine State, there was little cohesiveness in the overall designs or marketing efforts of the new communities. Developers saw the Florida landscape as a blank canvas, and each brought his own tastes to the projects. From English Tudor and Italian Rococo to Cape Cod cottage and rustic Quaker farmhouse, prospective buyers were presented a veritable feast of styles from which to choose. This individualistic approach to development design was a hallmark of Florida development in the first two decades of the twentieth century, but this was about to change.

  Originally intended to serve as a hospital for wounded American soldiers but never used as such, this Addison Mizner–designed building was converted into the Everglades Club by Paris Singer, the wealthy philanthropist who commissioned it. Admission to the Everglades Club was highly prized, and membership served to confirm one’s social standing in Palm Beach. Courtesy of the Florida Historical Society.

  In well-established Palm Beach, the mercurial Addison Mizner, an untrained but talented architect, accepted a commission from his friend, Paris Singer, to design and build a hospital for wounded soldiers. Drawing on his experiences in Latin America and Europe, Mizner constructed a large building with a combination of old Spanish missions and Mediterranean towers. The war ended before the hospital was completed, and Singer decided to open the building as the Everglades Club, a facility that would be restricted to only those members he considered worthy. As a result, Singer became the arbiter of Palm Beach society, filling the same role Ward McAllister had performed in the 1890s in New York.

  Mizner’s design for the Everglades Club took Palm Beach by storm, and when he created a thirty-seven-room “cottage” for Mrs. Edward T. Stotesbury, the acknowledged queen of the local society, he ignited a major revolution in Palm Beach and dramatically altered the immediate future of architectural design in the Sunshine State. For Palm Beach, the “hotel civilization” was replaced by a more permanent culture of elaborate, “damn the cost” winter homes that rivaled those of Newport in size and expense. Instead of more traditional American forms of architecture or the copies of European palaces that dominated there, Palm Beach houses featured the distinctive quasi-Mediterranean styles introduced by Mizner. For the rest of Florida, the majority of homes—large and small—built during the next twenty years would be derivatives of this “bastard” form of architecture, persisting in most upscale subdivisions until today. Mizner’s “new-old” architectural style appeared at just the right time, and his style became the face of Florida in the popular mind during the boom of the 1920s.

  CHAPTER 3

  World War Primes the Pump Even More

  The boom began at the psychological moment when its repercussion on the rest of America was most likely to be felt. It began at a time when there was more money in the United States than there had ever been before, at a time when the infinitely smaller boom in California had already lost a great part of its novelty, and at a time when the almost universal adoption of the automobile made possible a nationwide trek unthinkable in the days of the Alaskan gold-rushes and the booms in the Middle-West. The Florida boom, too, had the inestimable advantage of being advertised on a scale, and with a degree of skill, which had never previously been approached in the advertising of any similar activity. And Florida, though having been to a large extent actually created out of
worthless swamps and impassable bogs by the skill and capital of its engineers, had about it the additional glamour of an absolutely untested intrinsic value. Nobody knew what Florida land was actually worth, apart from boom conditions; nobody knows even to this day.

  —T.H. Weigall, Boom in Paradise, 1932

  By the end of the 1890s, a growing class of professional business managers oversaw the giant corporations of the robber barons, and while they did not accrue the vast fortunes of the super rich, they did have significant amounts of disposable income that afforded them the opportunity to take vacations and to participate in the “good life.” Thorstein Veblen, looking at the emergence of the middle class during this period, labeled it the “leisure class,” obsessed with conspicuous consumption—a designation that was very apt. “The quasi-peaceable gentleman of leisure, then, not only consumes of the staff of life beyond the minimum required for subsistence and physical efficiency,” he wrote in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899),

  but his consumption also undergoes a specialization as regards the quality of the goods consumed. He consumes freely and of the best, in food, drink, narcotics, shelter, services, ornaments, apparel, weapons and accoutrements, amusements, amulets, and idols or divinities. In the process of gradual amelioration which takes place in the articles of his consumption, the motive principle and proximate aim of innovation is no doubt the higher efficiency of the improved and more elaborate products for personal comfort and well-being. But that does not remain the sole purpose of their consumption. The canon of reputability is at hand and seizes upon such innovations as are, according to its standard, fit to survive. Since the consumption of these more excellent goods is an evidence of wealth, it becomes honorific; and conversely, the failure to consume in due quantity and quality becomes a mark of inferiority and demerit [emphasis added].