#309 History of Miami Beach 1960s
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Miami Beach Tourist Development Authority
Publicity Department
555 - 17 Street
Miami Beach, Florida 33139
MIAMI BEACH HISTORY
MIAMI BEACH--Guts and money built Miami Beach. Girlies put it
on the map.
In half a century, the one island that has it all has grown
from a swampland to the world's most modern, most concentrated 12-
month playground; from 644 to more than 85,000 permanent residents.
Four men had the intestinal fortitude to push ahead. Two
were New Jersey agricultural visionaries, John S. Collins and his
son-in-law, T. J. Pancoast. The other two were Florida-born brothers,
J. N. and J. E. Lummus.
Bankrolling the future of the place where the summer spends the
winter was an Indiana sportsman millionaire, Carl Graham Fisher.
Rounding out the six-man constellation of early stars who shone
in and for Miami Beach was Steve Hannegan. This Hoosier publicity
genius supplied bathing beauty pictures to more than 500 American
newspapers every week. The editors wanted girlie art and Hannegan
fed their appetites.
The Roaring Twenties saw Miami Beach begin to toddle, then walk
and finally gallop through the great Florida land boom until the
bubble burst in 1925 and the great hurricane of 1926 flattened the
burgeoning play land and put the finishing touches on most of the
paper fortunes.
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2-Miami Beach History
Collins was the first of the real Miami Beach pioneers to make
the scene in person and leave a lasting memory. A respected horti-
culturist in his native New Jersey, John S. Collins involved himself
originally with a $5,000 loan to friends who envisioned Miami Beach
as the perfect farming land.
He later paid his first visit to the island in the early 1890's.
A friend described how Collins "walked into a virgin jungle of
palmetto scrub, kneeled and dug into the earth with his hands,
allowing the black, sandy loam to run through his fingers, the knowing
fingers of a dirt farmer with more than half a century of experience
behind him.
"That settled it. The last vestige of doubt was gone. As he
rose to his feet and dusted the clinging particles of sand from his
hands, Miami Beach was born."
Unfortunately, the birth was somewhat more complicated than
Collins' contemporary made it sound.
By the turn of the century, Collins had overruled apprehensive
partners and invested his cash in what was to become quickly the
largest grove in the world. To protect the young trees from strong
winds off the ocean, Collins planted the twin lanes of Australian pine
trees which now tower majestically over Pine Tree Drive.
In 1909, Collins bought out his doubting associates and as an
assist to his farming effort, launched plans for what is now the
Collins Canal. It was dug from the present Lake Pancoast to Biscayne
Bay and quickly recognized as one of the most beautiful features of
Miami Beach.
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3-Miami Beach History
Collins believed that one day the part of the island which was
unsuitable for farming could be developed as an exclusive residential
resort area. He had in mind to pattern it after, Atlantic-City, which
was then the summer playground of the wealthy. 'To get his produce to
Henry Flagler's railroad in Miami and potential land buyers from the
mainland to his "farm," Collins, at the age of 74, began construction
of a wooden bridge from the mainland.
He ran out of money in 1913 and Carl Graham Fisher, 38 and a
millionaire, loaned him $50,000 to finish the work. It was the
longest wooden bridge in the world at the time. Now the Venetian
Causeway, dotted with residential islands built on fill, stretches
across the same space.
At about the same time, Fisher had been cruising the ocean
waters on his yacht and noticed some land clearing activity on the
sandbar which was to become Miami Beach. He looked up the Lummus
brothers and inquired what they were about. They told him they
envisioned a city the sea and Fisher inquired why they didn't do all
the work at once. Then Lummus wrote in his memoirs:
"I told him we had an awful good reason and' that was we did
not have the money, so he loaned us $150,000 and we paid him eight
percent interest and gave him 105 acres of swampland from Lincoln
Road south to 15th Street as a bonus. We had paid $150 an acre for
the land we gave Fisher.
"That, and that alone, is what started Miami Beach in a big
way. "
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4-Miami Beach History
Fisher put his new holdings together with 200 acres, a strip
1,800 feet wide and a mile deep from the ocean to the bay, which
Collins had given him as a gesture of appreciation for the bridge
loan. Then the auto industry magnate bought 200 acres more to the
south and an additional 60 acres on the bayfront.
As the five-year old City of Miami Beach began to move in
earnest, there thus were three major property owners in 1920. The
Lummus brothers had formed the Miami Ocean View Company, Carl Fisher
was operating as the Alton Beach Realty Company, and the Collins'
development was the Miami Beach Improvement Company.
Dammers and his associate, one Gillett whose first name has
been lost in the records, said they needed a gimmick before they
began to pitch the crowds. The Lummus brothers bought carloads of
glassware and crockery and everybody who came on the boats won some
prize. Then Doc Dammers began his huckstering.
The first sale of the first auction was a put-up job. A Miami
notable bid it in for Collins at $5,000 and the stampede was on,
The next buyer was a bona fide customer and the first rumble of the
Miami Beach boom began.
J. N. Lummus, later to be Miami Beach's first mayor, finally
offered free Collins Avenue lots to persons who promised to build
houses on them to the Lummus specifications, He gave away 35 lots
and the building began. Some of the original beach bungalows stood
through hurricanes and bust until the massive hotel construction
swept them aside after World War II.
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5-Miami Beach History
Most historians have credited Fisher with the "free lot to
house builders" idea but Pete Chase, who was Fisher's general sales
manager during the 1920's, credits Lummus with the promotion plan
which put the Miami Beach show on the road.
Collins by 1920 had abandoned his first notion of making Miami
Beach a lush tropical farmland and saw the potential of it as a
resort development entirely.
Nature had been unfortunately sparing in the original land area
for Miami Beach. Fisher and Collins set about remedying the over-
sight in a hurry. The original 1,600 acres of the sandbar were
enlarged in 10 years to another 2,800 acres by constant dredging,
pumping, and filling from the shallow bottom of Biscayne Bay. Fisher,
backed by his almost endless Prest-O-Lite fortune, spent more than
$4 million for 37 miles of bulkheads to bolster the fill land.
By 1923, two years before the Florida boom as a whole hit its
peak, Miami Beach was prospering mightily and independently all on
its own power. The boom was just one more exciting episode in the
steady progress of Miami Beach. The newcomers it brought were mostly
undesirables -- fast money promoters with no scruples and Fisher did
his best to exclude the fly-by-night boys.
Fisher held to firm lines when he had a buyer for his land. He
investigated financial resources. His terms were strict: Even at
the height of the boom, Fisher demanded 25 percent of the purchase
price in cash and the balance in full in 18 months. He took a leaf
from the Lummus book and wrote into his contracts that the buyer must
build on the property within 12 months.
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Fisher held firm to his original idea that Miami Beach would
succeed only by catering to the newly rich of the industrial north
who found Palm Beach too snobbish and too conservative.
One cynical observer remarked at the time that Miami Beach was
"what was left over when God finished making Palm Beach." Fisher
heard him but ignored the sarcasm. When the get-rich-quick crowd
was begging for help in the late 1920's, Carl Graham Fisher's fortune
was virtually intact.
If he hadn't mortgaged his Miami Beach holdings to finance an
ill-conceived resort venture on damp and dismal Long Island at about
the same time, Fisher would have owned most of Miami Beach. But he
gambled in Yankee1and and he lost. It cost him $12 million and
Collins' successors, son Irving and son-in-law Thomas J, Pancoast,
took over most of the Fisher holdings in Miami Beach.
The horde of personal servants melted away, his wife divorced
him and Carl Fisher, whose money backed up the men with the guts,
spent his last years in a small Miami Beach cottage, almost broke by
the standards of the life he had known.
Even with the debacle of the boom-bust in the rest of Florida,
the great 1926 hurricane scars still visible, Miami Beach began to
crawl back toward prosperity long before the rest of America.
No small amount of credit for the comeback belongs to Steve
Hannegan, the Indiana publicity expert Fisher brought to Miami Beach
in 1924. Within 10 years, Hannegan had built the most effective
municipal public relations machine the world had ever seen. Under
his direction, publicity became an industry and a fine art.
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7-Miami Beach History
Hannegan sized up the possibilities of what he had to market
and saw quickly it was the fact a visitor could take an ocean dip off
Miami Beach in January in surf warmer than the water off Los Angeles
in August.
How do I call the world's attention to our warm surf, Hannegan
asked himself? Legs. Newspapers across the land clamored for pictures
the photographers called "girlies." They wanted curvaceous young
things, singly and/or in droves, with particular attention on the legs
which skirts had uncovered since the end of World War I.
Only in Miami Beach could you find girlies in bathing suits,
flashing bare legs, in the wintertime. Steve Hannegan lined them up
in everything from solo shots to virtual platoons and outgoing mail-
bags were stuffed every day with girlies headed for picture-hungry
news editors in the frozen north.
Hannegan was not just a flesh peddler, though. He established
quickly a gilt-edged reputation for accuracy and honesty in reporting.
He could not care less whether the news story spoke good or evil
about Miami Beach. Just so long as it pinpointed the happening as
Miami Beach.
He set up a separate staff to send notes to society editors in
northern cities whose financially elite were basking under the warm
sun in the place where summer spent the winter. Hannegan sold all
the five U.S. newsreel companies on sending at least one cameraman
each to Miami Beach every winter.
Pathe, Fox, Universal, Paramount and Hearst Metronone had a
combined weekly audience of around 60 million and Hannegan didn't
miss a one.
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a-Miami Beach History
Miami Beach was pleasant in the winter and when the newsreel
men ran out of routine footage covering speedboat races, fashion
shows, swimming meets, planes in flight against the South Florida
skyline, they were easy prey for press agent stunts. Staged rescues
from the ocean were a staple always good for several hundred feet of
film; girlies were quickly available for posing, running, and
cavorting on the sand.
To find as many bathing beauties as he needed, the Hannegan
staffer only had to go as far as the nearest high school. The civic
spirit was such that schoolgirls were freed from classes when girlies
were in demand.
The results Hannegan got for the money he spent were fantastic.
On a budget of less than $50,000 a year, Miami Beach was getting news
and picture space in northern newspapers which could not have been
even approximated for $10 million.
The girlies were not the sole source of the publicity. Honest-
to-God celebrities were frequent Miami Beach visitors.
Warren G. Harding, following the lead of thousands of his
fellow Ohioans, came to Miami Beach for his post-election, preinaugu-
ration vacation in January of 1921. The President-elect and most of
his Cabinet-designate had made a leisurely trip to Miami Beach,
floating down Florida's inland waterways on a huge houseboat with
stops along the way to play golf. Harding relished the spirit of
Miami Beach and told friends after a few days:
"Your own people here have not awakened to the possibilities of
this playground of America. This beach is wonderful. It is
developing like magic."
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The Harding party stayed at the Flamingo, Fisher's second and
most luxurious hotel which had opened just a few weeks before. He
golfed and as a publicity stunt, Fisher had his famed young elephant,
Rosie, tote Harding's bag for the new Republican chi.ef executive.
That same year, the Miami Beach Chamber of Commerce was
organized. The first of two huge swanky gambling casinos opened for
business. (For two years in the mid-1930's, Miami Beach had legalized
slot machines but the State Legislature repealed the permission as
quickly as it could.) Al Capone came and went during those Roaring
Twenties.
The very snooty Bath Club was born, as was the Committee of
One Hundred, referred to then as the unofficial Senate of Miami Beach.
James M. Cox, who lost to Harding in the 1920 election, resigned
from the Bath Club in 1930 and led that body's membership waiting list
into a new socially elite group he called the Surf Club. Cox was
enraged because Bath Club rules forbade entrance as a Cox guest to
Adolph Ochs, publisher of the New York Times and a Jew.
Fifth Avenue stores began to open branches in Miami Beach with
Saks and Best & Co. leading'the merchandising parade. Moe Annenberg,
the Philadelphia publishing tycoon who controlled the nation's racing
information wires, built a lavish home in Miami Beach but failed in
his attempt to buy the Miami Herald.
NEWSWEEK magazine once described Miami Beach as "4,000 acres of
noise and wonder, the garishness and fun of Broadway, the nightly
parade of mink coats, no matter what the weather. Most of all,
perhaps, it's a sense of luxury."
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Miami Beach today, a half century out of the mangrove swamp
and palmetto scrubland, still fits a comment Carl Fisher once made
to Steve Hannegan.
"Steve," Fisher told him, "Miami Beach was the only natural
we ever had. But boy, what a natural it was."
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