Wednesday, February 16, 2022 – WHEN THE TEMPERATURE IS 17, JUMP ON A PLANE TO 77 DEGREE FLORIDA
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2022
599th Issue
IT IS COLD,
LETS’ GO TO FLORIDA
STEPHEN BLANK
It’s cold. Let’s go to Florida.
Stephen Blank
Long ago, in the early 1950s, my mom loaded me and my sister into our stick shift, non-airconditioned Chevy and headed south on pre-Interstate highways from Pittsburgh to Miami Beach. I handled our AAA Triptic maps and she drove, 4 or 5 days. We spent summers in the ‘50s there, visiting her family, watching Miami Beach grow and change. Now with friends fleeing south to warmer climes, I thought it would be fun to think again about Florida.
Of course, some history. Florida was contested by the Spanish, French and British from earliest colonial times. West Florida (the Panhandle) was a distinct region (important because it bordered on the Mississippi); the east and west coasts of the peninsula developed separately, and the south was an impossible, disease-ridden swamp. And, also, Key West (important because it overlooked Caribbean trade routes).
Florida was ceded by Spain to the US in 1819 and became a territory in 1821, sparsely settled by Seminole Native Americans, escaped African American slaves (many lived with the Seminoles), Spaniards and folks from older Southern plantation regions. With territorial status, the pieces were merged into a single entity with a new capital city in Tallahassee, chosen because it lay halfway between the St. Augustine and Pensacola, the old governmental centers.
The US fought 3 bloody wars with Seminoles – who were finally forcibly removed from the territory (think Andrew Jackson). Florida became our twenty-seventh state in 1845; by 1850 the population had grown to some 87,000 (New York City’s population in 1850 was 590,000), including about 39,000 African American slaves and 1,000 free Blacks. Before the Civil War, Florida was becoming another southern cotton state.
Lithograph of a residential street scene in Tallahassee, Florida. https://www.floridamemory.com/items/show/2826
After the War, Florida took a different route. Jacksonville and Pensacola flourished because of the demand for lumber and forest products in the nation’s growing economy. During the final quarter of the nineteenth century, large-scale commercial agriculture, especially cattle, grew in importance. Industries such as cigar manufacturing took root in the immigrant communities of the state.
And tourism: By the late 1880s, Naples and Marco Island were viewed as winter resorts for wealthy Northerners and sportsmen. Steamboat tours on Florida’s winding rivers were a popular attraction for these visitors. Travelers praised Florida’s climate and its reported ability to ease various ailments. Florida was even said to be an aphrodisiac, for “heat stimulates powerfully the faculty of reproduction,” as Daniel Garrison Brinton, medical doctor turned anthropologist, wrote in an 1869 guidebook.
Travelers could make their way to Florida by steamboat and the great private yachts of the age, built for blue sea travel, could have made the trip. But the number of visitors arriving this way could not have been very great. Rail transformed Florida from a backward agricultural state with poor transportation connections to the North and Midwest. By 1900, the foundation of the state’s growth had laid down with the construction of railroad systems along both coasts. Henry Morrison Flagler and Henry Plant are the two figures most associated with Florida railroads.
Henry Morrison Flagler was one of John D. Rockefeller’s partners in creating Standard Oil. Flagler came to St. Augustine in 1883 on his honeymoon and found the city lacking in luxurious accommodations that would attract wealthy families. He realized that paradise could be marketed and sold, and he launched a new career. In 1885 Flagler started developing the area around the old city of St. Augustine, building a grand hotel, the Hotel Ponce de Leon in 1888. (The hotel is now Flagler College.)
http://www.historic-structures.com/fl/st_augustine/ponce_de_leon_hotel.php
But even the grandest hotels would be empty unless guests could get there. Flagler realized that the key to developing Florida was transportation. In the next two decades, he bought smaller railroads, put them all on the same standard gauge track, and opened Florida to wider tourism. Flagler also built schools, a hospital and churches in St. Augustine, “transforming St. Augustine from a seedy southern Saratoga into a glamorous winter Newport.”
By 1912, Flagler’s trains traveled the length of the state to Key West, constructing a string of luxury hotels from St. Augustine to Miami.
In 1893, he selected a small, sandy island called Palm City and built a huge hotel called “The Breakers” to promote his railroad growth. Even before the railroad reached Palm Beach, affluent Northerners were already planning their winter mansions. Flagler built his new wife a massive marble winter mansion called Whitehall and Palm Beach soon became the winter watering hole of America’s industrial elite.
https://www.cntraveler.com/hotels/united-states/palm-beach/the-breakers-palm-beach
On the West Coast, a Connecticut businessman, Henry Bradley Plant, started another railroad boom when he obtained a charter for a South Florida Railroad on the St. Johns River to Tampa Bay. Plant’s railroad turned Tampa into a deep-water center for freighters and steamers from Cuba and South America. The rail line opened the region to citrus and vegetable growers – a vast improvement over the twenty days to reach Northern markets by boat.
Plant’s railroad quickly attracted the Key West cigar industry and Northern manufacturers to Tampa, as well as investors who started trolley lines and electric companies. Nothing was as spectacular as Henry Plant’s largest hotel, the Tampa Bay Hotel. At one hundred dollars per day, Plant hoped to attract the Northern rich to his empire. (The hotel is now part of the University of Tampa.)
With railroads now stretching the length of the state, the Everglades being drained and then World War I, which cut off richer Americans from traditional European beach resorts, Florida boomed. Developers pushed Florida real estate – Carl Fisher who backed Miami Beach development, purchased a huge billboard in Times Square proclaiming “It’s June In Miami”. Brokers and dealers speculated wildly, selling underwater properties to clueless northerners. In 1925, some 7,000 people seeking a new life and perhaps a new fortune entered Florida each day. In Massachusetts alone, owners of more than 100,000 bank accounts used their savings to invest in Florida land. Deposits in Florida banks increased 400 percent in three years.
In the increasing frenzy of Florida real estate speculation in the 1920s, lots were bought and sold for double their prices in a matter of weeks. Then options on lots were traded, and options on options were sold. Fabulous stories abounded, like the one of a cabby who took a couple the thirteen hundred miles from Manhattan to Palm Beach and, with his fare and tip, invested in real estate and made a million dollars. Check out the Marx Brothers’ film “The Coconuts” for a hilarious but all too accurate picture of the boom.
https://marxbrothers.fandom.com/wiki/The_Cocoanuts?file=Cocoanuts-scene.jpg
Even in January 1925, investors began to read negative press about Florida investments. Forbes magazine warned that Florida land prices were based solely upon the expectation of finding a customer, not upon any reality of land value. The Internal Revenue Service began to scrutinize the Florida real estate boom as a giant scam. Speculators intent on flipping properties at huge profits found new buyers increasingly scarce. And then bust.
Before the bust, one day’s Miami Daily News ran to 504 pages and weighed as much as a healthy baby; just two years later, in 1927, a single edition of another Florida daily carried 41 pages of tax delinquency notices. In time, nearly 90 % of Florida’s municipalities defaulted on their bonds. Overleveraged banks collapsed. Empty lots stretched across mile after mile of unbuildable land. The developer Walter P. Fuller offered the not-quite-last word in a memoir published three decades later: “We just ran out of suckers.” Florida’s property bubble burst did not set off the Great Depression, but the Depression rolled over and exacerbated Florida’s situation.
World War II was a powerful accelerator in Florida’s recovery with military bases sprouting in all directions. After the war, many who had been stationed in Florida returned to live there. Florida remained a winter resort largely for the well-off until the earthquake change produced by air conditioning and economy non-stop flights. Summer tourism boomed. Middle class New Yorkers could pay in advance with one check for transportation, accommodation and meals (the “American Plan, two meals a day), and Florida – particularly the billowing Miami Beach – stole the clientele from the upstate borscht belt resorts in the Catskills. Retirement communities and long-term care facilities expanded across the state and, finally, new forms of destination resorts drew in floods of tourists. And my mother and me.
The story of Miami Beach, dear to me (and to my dermatologist) is worth a story of its own. In any case, keep warm. Spring is coming
Stephen Blank
RIHS
February 7, 2022
WEDNESDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY
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MODEL OF FLUSHING MEADOW PARK FROM THE\PANORAMA OF NEW YORK CITY
AT QUEENS MUSEUM,
.ED LITCHER GOT IT RIGHT!!
Text by Judith Berdy
Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS
Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website
Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
Sources
Pics https://www.ancestry.com/contextux/historicalinsights/florida-land-boom-1920s
https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1997-02-07-1997038026-story.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/14/books/review/christopher-knowlton-bubble-in-the-sun-florida.html https://www.floridarambler.com/florida-lodging-cabins-bb/historic-hotels-in-florida/All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
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