Miami. Jan Nijman
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