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1632-5 Synagogues • • . • 75 SPECTACULAR YEARS MARK MIAMI BEACH HISTORY In its 75-year history, being marked this year, Miami Beach has served as the sun-spashed stage for a spectacular parade of wildly- assorted characters and events rivalling any city in the world. Its players run the gamut from Rosie the Elephant to Ringo the Beatle to Jimmy the Greek, up arid down the scale. Its famed sun, surf and sand have been sampled over the decades by princes, presidents and prime ministers, Russian ballet masters and Metropolitan Opera tenors, Scarface Al and G1 Joe, Pulitzer prize winners and Nobel laureates. It is arid has been a favorite watering hole for more stage and screen celebrities than there are stars and footprints on Hollywood Boulevard. it has hosted with equal suavity national political conventions and Miss Universe contests. Miami Beach has been called the billion dollar sandbar, the • electric island, the nation's winter playground and the international resort for the jet set. It's all that and more. And it's still anticipatintg new fields to conquer. Not a bad record for a city that only in 1990 will reach 100,000 population. It all started on March 26, 1915, when 33 voters (out of a permanent population of around 300) met to incorporate the City of Miami Beach -- a place that was just emerging from a steamy, mosquito- ridden mangrove swamp in the middle of Biscayne. Bay. • THE PIONEERS '1 he genesis of Miami Beach actually was in 1909 when John Collins, a Quaker farmer from New Jersey and the namesake of today's glitzy Collins Avenue, bought out a failing coconut plantation that had been established qn the•low-lying island.. A couple of years later he decided to build a wooden bridge to the mainland, roughly along the route of today's MacArthur Causeway, to properly develop his farmland§. As has happened so often in Miami Beach's history, a developer and bankers got together, to swing a major improvement project. Collins financed his bridge with loans from two brothers, J. E. and J. N. Lummus, who each owned a bank in Miami. The Lummus brothers as part of the deal also invested in some land on the island. But Collins ran out of money before his bridge was completed. Enter Carl Fisher.;, probably the single most important figure in the history of Miami Beach. Fisher, an Indianan who had made a fortune as a manufacturer of auto headlights and established a home in Miami, lent Collins the $50;000 or so he needed to finish his bridge. In return, Fisher got an 1,800-foot strip of land across the island, including what later became the famed Lincoln Road shopping and cultural mall. Fisher, an entrepreneur to his toenails, knew a good thing when he saw it and immediately set about transforming a swamp into a city. • I . • -2- He began spending millions of dollars to pump sand from the shallow Biscayne Bay bottom and fill in the mangrove swamps. lie carved out the route of Lincoln Road. He and other investors began building substantial homes on the newly-pumped while sand fill. He took a scraggy bathing casino at what is now 23rd St. and Collins Avenue and transformed it into the luxurious Roman Pools. Farther down the beach, Joe and Jennie Weiss established a restaurant in their home (it's now Joe's Stone Crabs). The stage was set. Combining the holdings of Fisher, Collins and the Lummus brothers, the City of Miami Beach was incorporated and J. N. Lummus was named its first mayor. THE ROARING TWEN'1'l1'.S The era of the 1920s was a swinging, exciting time for Miami Beach. In one short decade it became famous for boom, bust, blow and bathing beauties. The decade dawned with Carl Fisher in full cry toward the development of Miami Beach as a tourist resort such as the country had never seen. He was busy carving out Lincoln Road, building golf courses, tennis courts and even a polo field to amuse the thousands of tourists he foresaw for the Miami Beach winter playground. With his,_ flair for publicity, he imported an elephant named Rosie, and put her to work doing some of the heavy hauling at his construction sites. He hired famed publicist Steve Hannigan to beat the drums for Miami Beach and Hannigan deluged the nation's press with photos of the bathing beauties who became a Miami Beach trademark. • They shared the publicity photo limelight with Rosie the Elephant. By 1925, Miami Beach was one devil-may-care island of short skirts;' short! hair and long romantic nights under a tropical moon. N. B. T. Roney built the towered Roney Plaza hotel, at 23rd and Collins, which for more than 20 years was host to the nation's biggest names in the business, political, entertainment and sports worlds. Fisher and- other developers pumped new islands out of the bay -- Star, Palm, Hibiscus, LaGorce, Indian Creek and others. Millionaires came down to. establish palatial oceanfront homes and estates. One of them was the rubber magnate, Harvey Firestone, whose one-time estate is now the site of the fabulous Fontainebleau Hotel. Prohibition was in effct, but Miami Beach took little notice of it. Ruin runners, dodging the Coast Guard, formed a supply line from the nearby Bahamas islands. Once the frustrated Coast Guard reportedly pursued a ruin runner, onto the lawn of one of Miami Beach's luxury hotels and shot him dead in full view of a covey of pop-eyed guests. 4 The last half of the 1920s was a different story. Beginning in the summer of 1925 the real estate and building boom in Miami Beach and the rest of South Florida began collapsing. The bust was partly the result of public reaction' against the rampant wild speculation in real estate, partly the result of transportation problems that cut South Florida off from importing construction materials by land or sea. The final blow, literally, came on the night of September 17/18, 1926, when a hurricane with devastating 130-mph winds ravaged Miami and Miami Beach. -3- In Miami Beach, the destruction of buildings, homes, boats, piers, bathing casinos, amusement parks, trees and streets was awesome. But the community rallied and slowly, over many months, began to pull itself back together. By the season of 1928-29, winter visitors were beginning to be encouraged enough to return. One of the not-so-welcome winter visitors of that year, incidentally, was gang lord Al Capone, who moved into a mansion on Palm Island and until 1932 resisted all the community's efforts to dislodge him. TRIC GOLDEN DAYS The thirties may well have been the golden days of Miami Beach as the nation's winter playground•. Even the depression which gripped much of the country in the early part of the decade had a gilt lining for Miami Beach. The city had pulled itself back together from the twin disasters of the hurricane and real estate bust and was beginning to lure more and more millionaires and well-heeled investors. in 1931, Col. Henry Doherty, the oil magnate, bought the posh Roney Plaza and hired premier New York publicist Carl Byoir to further promote the "winter playground." Celebrities like Entertainer Al Jolson and Columnist Walter Winchell could be found sharing a blanket on the Roney's beach. Oil tycoons, railroad magnates and Wall Street financiers leased lush suites at the Roney. In 1932, Florida legalized patri-mutuel betting and Joseph Widener, of the famed thoroughbred racing family, bought the Hialeah Jockey Club and:transformed it into Hialeah Park. This was of importance to Miami Beach since the resort's winter season coincided with the Hialeah winter meeting, roughly from early January to Washington's birthday, February 22. The state's legalization of wagering also brought the establishment •of the Miami Beach Kennel Club at the tip of South Beach. There greyhounds raced where once John Collins farmed coconuts and avocados. Following his election in 1932, President Franklin D. Roosevelt vacationed here on the yacht of his friend, Vincent Astor (and later survived an assassination attempt in Miami's Bayfront Park). Later on in the decade, the Prince of Wales, the ex-king who gave up his throne for "the woman I love," came over frequently from his • post as governor of the Bahamas to exhort Americans to support the British war effor.t.-• By tine middle of the 1930s, Miami Beach tourism was picking up appreciably. New airlines like Pan Am, Eastern, National and Delta were increasingly becoming the transportation of choice for affluent visitors. To meet the tourist demand, Miami Beach rushed a building program of new hotels and apartments, mainly along Collins Avenue and Ocean Drive, below 15th St. Today, more than 150 of these curve-and-circle "moderne" style buildings erected between 1935 and 1940 form the city's noted- Art Deco district, listed on the National Register of Historic Places. -4- • MIAMI BEACH GOES TO'WAR In 1941, Miami Beach was looking forward to its best winter season ever, with a splendid assemblage of new deluxe hotels, lavish restaurants and glittering night clubs ready for the anticipated flood of visitors. Dreams vanished when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Miami Beach went to war as thoroughly as any community in the United States. Its complex of hotels and restaurants, designed for pleasure-bound tourists, were ready as instant barracks and mess halls for war-bound servicemen. Its outdoor playgrounds for golfers, polo players and other sportsmen, were transformed into drill fields. During the war years, nearly 150 luxury hotels with more than 70,000 rooms were taken over by the Army Air Forces as training centers. Later, the War Department estimated that about one-fourth of 4rmy Air Forces officers and one-fifth of their enlisted men were trained at Miami Beach. Even in wartime, though, Miami Beach had its quota of celebrities. Clark Gable trained as an Air Force officer here. So did Gilbert Roland, who brought along his wife, the glamorous Constance Bennett, who settled in a winter home near Lincoln Road. World War I1 and the GIs it brought here marked a turning point in the history of Miami Beach. No longer was it just a smalltown winter resort. Thousands of veterans from Iowa and Kansas and other faraway places who had trained at Miami Beach returned after the war to swell the community's ranks of permanent residents. A couple of other events, little noticed at the time, but which were to have a profound effect on the future fortunes of Miami Beach, occurred in the last half of the 1940s.. In 1946 the famed Roney Plaza became one of the first hotels to install"-a complete air conditioning system. And in 1949 .TV •came to South Florida when station WTVJ went on the air for the first time. • A NEW FACE TO THE WORLD The 1950s were a decade in which Miami Beach firmly established itself as a viable community, changed its direction, and presented a new face to the world. This maturing of Miami Beach stemmed from a number of factors. An increasing permanent population spurred by returning ex-GIs arid retirees engendered a growing spirit of community pride. Scientific arid technical developments played their part. Air conditioning .beacme widespread and transformed Miami Beach from a winter resort to a year-round playground. The luxury hotels that previously had siniply closed down after the winter season began to stay open all year. Mithni Beach hotels joined with airlines such as Delta, National and Eastern to offer attractive summer vacation packages at prices that thousands more than the affluent few to sample the joys of Miami Beach's sun, sand and surf. 13ut perhaps the greatest impetus to Miami Beach as a world resort came with the dawning of the electronic age. Miami Beach and television seemed made for each other. • • _5_ It started with Arthur Godfrey. When the Old Redhead made his first radio/television simulcast from the Kenilworth Hotel in 1953, the show claimed the largest audience ever reached over the airways. Godfrey, of course, was followed by a parade of other national shows originating from Miami Beach -- Ed Sullivan, Jackie Gleason, the Beatles, Liberate, a series of Miss Universe pageants, and others. Millions of viewers here and in other countries saw Miami Beach. 'I'lie Miami Beach Convention Center, with its allied Theater of the Performing Arts, opened in 1957, paving the way for much of the city's economic and cultural development to come. The natural outcome of all this was a surge of development in the city's tourist and convention industry. The Fontainebleau, for years a monumental symbol of the sophistication and luxury of Miami Beach, r -- Eden Roc, Deauville, Doral opened in 194. There were more the Beach, to name just a few. The decade also saw the development of one of the city's greatest resources in another field, the Mount Sinai Medical Center. In 1949 the city had acquired as war surplus the old luxury Nautilus Hotel, which had been used during World War II by the Veterans Administration as a 250-bed hospital. The city turned the property over to a community hospital group. Late in 1949, after about $1 million in improvements, the old Nautilus became officially Mount Sinai Hospital. But by the middle of the 1950s plans already were taking shape for a new Mount Sinai. And so began a series of campaigns to rally philanthropic support. Through the years these efforts have brought millions of dollars from the private community and established Mount Sinai as .one of the country's leading medical centers for research, teaching and patient care. .• A TIME OF TURMOIL The 1960s were a time of turmoil for most of the United States, and Miami-'Beaclh was no exception. In the very opening days of the decade Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba, only 250 miles from Collins Avenue. The Castro revolution was to have profound effects on Miami • Beach, although few realized it at the time. , '1'lie Cuban missile crisis exploded within two years, when the Soviets were detected installing missile launching pads in Cuba and South Floridians found themselves under the gun. As Castro terrorism increased on the island, more and more Cubans were seeking refuge in .South Florida. By the end of the decade, 400,000 of them had' settled in Dade county, arid Miami Beach for the first time• had a substantial Cuban colony. The war in Vietnam was going badly and in this country there were growing numbers of flower children and other anti-war demonstrators, increasing drug problems and other social unrest. The news wasn't all bad for Miami Beach, however. In 1964, the red hot English rock group, the Beatles, made their TV debut in America on the top-rated Ed Sullivan show, nationally televised from Miami Beach. A young fighter named Cassius Clay, later Muhammad Ali, was training at the city's Fifth Street Gym and in 1965 he became the world heavyweight champ in a nationally televised bout in Miami Beach. • -6- In 1968 another type of national attention was focussed on Miami Beach, when the Republican party chose the city as the site for its national convention. While adept and disarming Miami Beach police authorities kept hippies and other young demonstrators cooled down outside the convention center, delegates inside nominated Richard M. Nixon, a sometimes Key Biscayne resident and frequent Miami Beach visitor. A PAUSE TO REFRESH In the 1970s, Miami Beach stepped back, took a look at itself and began considering where it was and where it wanted to go in the future. The pause was somewhat dictated by a national recession that peaked in South Florida in the first half of the decade. Not that Miami Beach was in the doldrums during the era. For one thing, the success of the 1968 Republican national convention was so impressive that in 1972 both the Republicans AND Democrats brought their national conclaves to the Convention Center, where Richard Nixon and George McGovern were duly nominated. For another thing, the city happily preserved its reputation as a marketplace for the greatest names in the entertainment world. Famed Comedian Jackie Gleason, intrigued by the idea of being able to play golf every day in the city's year-round sunshine, packed up his entire television company in New York and brought it to Miami Beach. For several years, the highly popular Gleason show aired its national telecasts, from the beach's Theater of the Performing Arts. In 1978, multimillionaire developer Stephen Muss bought the Fontainebleau Hotel, which had been in a period of some decadence, and launched a more than $30 million program of renovating the hotel and its entertainment complex The 1970s also saw the growing of a cultural awareness on Miami Beach. Preservationists, spearheaded by Nancy Liebman, of the Miami Design Preser'vMtion League, realized what a design and architectural treasure (tie city had in the half century old "moderne" hotels and apar4ments on the southern tip of the community. They rallied to the . " support of the Art Deco buildings to save them from the wrecking ball of developers. 1m 1979, Miami Beach's Art Deco District was enrolled on the National Register of Historic Places. The Bass Museum began achieving increasing prominence as a collecting museum and exhibit center, especially in the area of Jewish history and culture. In the theatrical field, producer Zev Bufman and others began bringing •in popular Broadway plays, with the Theater of the Performing Arts a centerpiece for the stage offerings. Impresaria Judy Drucker of Miami Beach began organizing concert series that slowly but surely grew until they were attracting some of the most famous artists and orchestras from all over the world -- Pavarotti, Itzak Perlman, Dame Joan Sutherland, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the American Ballet Theater, and more. � z • -7- THE 7-T11B CULTURAL EVOLUTION A new Miami Beach began to emerge in the 1980s, galvanized by a sweeping cultural evolution -- social as well as artistic. The changes impacted almost as heavily on the community as any down through the years by John Collins, Carl Fisher, Jackie Gleason or Steve Hannigan. The population mix changed dramatically, among both tourists and permanent residents. A younger, more affluent crowd began to dilute the traditional preponderance of retirees. Thanks to the weakening dollar abroad, more and younger tourists from Europe and Asia found a vacation in glamorous Miami Beach within their reach. On Collins Avenue and Ocean Drive and the sidewalk cafes of the Art Deco district the air was full of conversations in French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese and a polyglot of other tongues. Fair-haired Scandinavians lazed on the beaches beside the tawny girls from Ipanema. Much of the new look centered on South Beach, where it had all begun three-quarters of a century ago with John Collins' farm. Spurred by the federal recognition of the Art Deco district, investors were spending millions of dollars to acquire and renovate the cherished "moderne" hotels of the 1930s. Preservationists fought harder and succeeded in saving others for the future. At the southern tip of„the island, the old Miami Beach Kennel Club and decaying early buildings made way for the lush South Pointe complex of modern condominiums, shops and beach amenities. The arts and entertainment aspects of the city's life took new vigor, too; On Lincoln Road, which Fisher had carved out of the tangle of mangroves to create the smartest shopping strip south of Fifth Avenue, the Miami City Ballet, dedicated to fostering South Florida performing ,talent, and the New World Symphony were flanked by artist ateliers. Television and movies continued to be Miami Beach allies. In the 1980s, Miami Vice, with its frequent scenes of the community, became . one of the"-top-rated shows on national television. Local and Hollywood producers used the city as a backdrop for their films. Farther up •the beach, hotel development and expansion also took on . - new lire in the 80s. The new super-deluxe Alexander Hotel opened in 1983 and others undertook substantial renovation and"refurbishing. The new dynamics of Miami Beach and its emerging pre-eminence as an international center were not lost on the outside business community, either. When a $6O million luxury hotel went on the market late in 1989, interested investors included Japanese, French and German hotel groups as well 'as i'ndividual investors from Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japann. . On Miami Beach's Diamond Anniversary, many more dismonds would appear to be in its future. it li I! •