1675-40 Fontainebleau Billion-Dollar Sandbar
A Biography
of Miami Beach
by Polly Redford
E. P. DUTTON & CO., INC.
NEW YORK 1970
1
I
148 Billion-Dollar Sandbar
recalls that even fake Renaissance carved ceilings required great Lai
skill in carving plaster molds. He says that in 1924 Miami had more lived 1
ifine wrought-iron workers than anywhere else in the world. This the St
ia rush of building attracted him to architecture, and in the early lated
twenties he went from Miami Beach to the Beaux Arts in Paris, made
! where promising young men were taught how to design Moorish sixties,
courtyards and authentic handles for Spanish doors. his bel
By 1930 most of Palm Beach and Miami Beach's oceanfront was lionaia
covered with Casas del Playas and Miramars whose red-tiled roofs hundri
and stuccoed walls looked as if Ponce de Le6n had really colonized • men,
1 Florida after all. In West Palm Beach, Miami, and Coral Gables, swept'
ten thousand cheaper imitations of these Spanish bastions loomed bling I
amid the pines and palmettos of the mainland where the better ones twenti{'
have now aged and weathered into a kind of boozy charm. But on and a II
I the Beach, oceanfront castillos didn't last long. Seventeen years ° •
of enol
after they built it, the Bartons sold "Buen Retiro"—no longer that se
retiro in spite of a high privacy wall that surrounded it, but the last the golll
single family residence in a sea of boardinghouses, apartments, and In r�
hotels. Today, the last vestige of the narrow, three-mile million- • seven j
aires' row along Collins Avenue from Twenty-second to Sixty-third want ti
streets has been replaced byhigh-riseulr
p hotels and apartments. Even PoP
at Palm Beach many of the old castles are crumbling as fortunes move;
Ifade and servants leave the pantry to join the new leisure class. (5) the'
I
i Whenever one of these relics is wrecked, people come from miles F, (6) a `'1
around to salvage the tile, the golden fish-shaped bathroom fixtures, against,
ainst,,
wrought-iron hinges, sculptured copper drain-spouts, brass sun- the verl
dials, moorish grillework, French weathervanes, and Spanish furni- standar
ture and carry them back to Fort Lauderdale or Coral Gables where based;'1
old houses are being renovated and new ones need some Old World and su 1,
charm. Antique shops on Coral Way still do a roaring trade in real estI
Spanish baroque, whether it be genuine Mizener, artifically aged for hitrl
I' chests from Boca Raton, or the cheaper forms of Rudolph Valen- Alonj
tino Gothic from Grand Rapids. Miami Beach has its own antiques: gold mill
it's worth a special trip to the Fontainebleau's lobby to see the coy west of
marble maidens from the Harvey Firestone estate that once oc- sales of
'I ' cupied the same site. hundred
1! '
I
t
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The Flamingo 129
ou ever saw to push these gondolas If Carl hadn't spent money so much faster than he made it, his
o be stripped to the waist and wear
ibly necklaces of live crabs or craw- Beach land might have showed a profit in 1920,for this was the year
something about this on the front that Miami Beach really started to boom. Alton Beach Realty sold
.g Post. over half a million dollars' worth of lots during the first two weeks
;tion of how to pay for all this in January, and by the year's end total sales rose to $1,966,000.
l Collins sold his bridge to a group of Jacksonville developers who
to reach a grand total near $2 were to remake it into the Venetian Causeway and Islands; the
th and James Gilman had prom- ) money he made helped finance his portion of the Miami Beach Bay-
ecil Fowler sell Flamingo bonds, I
11920 was quite a different prop- shore Company. That year census takers made their first appear-
ance on Miami Beach and solemnly counted its permanent resi-
month earlier. Money was tight, dents—all 644 of them.
e pinch of a short, sharp depres- Completion of the County Causeway,which opened on February
20-1921. With a hotel scheduled 17, and the news of Carl's luxury hotel stimulated much of 1920's
is forced to borrow on everything
sales, but in the long run it was the people to whom these lots were
sold that counted most. The Talbotts bought in 1920;so did Frank
an old friend in Indianapolis, "I { Seiberling, president of Goodyear Tire & Rubber, who bought the
It going to be able to pay the rates 1 Hanan house next to Carl's. He was followed by another rubber
o is an extravagant hotel—it just magnate, Harvey Firestone, who came to play polo and eventually
-e money for the number of rooms bought the Snowden estate on the oceanfront at Forty-fourth Street
States.We had to build it in spite
—and she is built!" •
(now occupied by the Fontainebleau). Alfred J. Du Pont bought
oceanfront property in 1922; Gar Wood moved from his bayfront
121 and 1922,in spite of its imme- home in Miami to an oceanfront home on the Beach. Real-estate
921 caught him at the worst pos- agents always pointed out these houses, and made sure their clients
.1, dredging,bulkheading, and fill- knew the motor kings who owned them: Albert Champion (spark
Company had to be paid for, and
plugs),Harry Stutz(maker of that 1920's dream car the"Bearcat"),
line as well. There were, besides, Roy Chapin (Hudson Motors), C. F. Kettering(Delco starters and
walks, landscaping, many minor electric systems).
gns, and so on—that drained
>uld fill them. All in all, Carl was You can hear the same thing today if you take one of those sight-
noney on Miami Beach before it seeing boats that sail down Indian Creek, around La Gorce Island,
921 depression, he just bulled his and past the picture windows of waterfront homes that line Bis-
rom everyone he knew. This had cayne Waterway and Surprise Lake. As each house comes into
I with Speedway and again with view, the guide tells his passengers how much it cost, who owns it,
and his wildest dreams at Miami and how he made his money. There are, he says, four ways of be-
he was convinced it would surely coming a millionaire: (1)work for it, (2) marry it, (3)inherit it,(4)
steal it—"and we have all four kinds here on the Beach."