Miami, Florida

The largest city in a four-county South Florida metro area of more than 5 million people, Miami was founded in the 1890s and has been attracting the national spotlight ever since. During the course of the 20th century, Miami progressed from untamed tropical frontier outpost to vacation paradise to vibrant multicultural metropolis. Along the way, the city was continuously shaped, reshaped, and transformed by powerful forces of change, including race, immigration, internal migration, land speculation, depression, war, technology, environmentalism, and governmental policies. Although the city's image has shifted dramatically over time, Americans have found Miami endlessly fascinating.

Boosters, builders, and promoters played an important role in city making and image building through much of Miami's early history. Henry Flagler, a millionaire oil man and railroad builder, brought his Florida East Coast Railroad to Miami in 1896. Within months, he established a newspaper, calling it the Miami Metropolis. Miami had only a few hundred residents at the time, but Flagler had big dreams for the place. He successfully orchestrated a movement for a city charter and then poured money into streets, utilities, port facilities, and a luxurious hotel, hoping to lure wealthy northern tourists away from St. Augustine and Palm Beach to his new “Magic City.” By building on South Florida's essential natural resources—sunshine, seashore, and subtropical climate—Flagler subsidized the transformation of Miami from a tiny frontier village into a flourishing center of tourism and winter recreation.

Flagler died in 1913, but his Florida dream was infectious. Other builders and promoters followed, including Carl Fisher, who built Miami Beach from a sandbar and mangrove swamp into a fabulous real estate and tourist promotion, and George Merrick, who used modern planning principles in fashioning the city-beautiful suburb of Coral Gables. By the early 1920s, dozens of other speculators and dreamers brought a full-scale real estate boom to Miami, Miami Beach, and a few hundred aspiring residential subdivisions. The boom peaked and fizzled in 1926, but the image of Miami as a winter wonderland had already been embedded in the national consciousness. Books and articles about Miami touted the city's charms. In his book The Truth About Florida, published in 1925 at the height of Florida fever, Charles Donald Fox whetted appetites and built expectations in asserting Miami's strengths. Fox provided few details, but by the early 1920s, more than 150,000 tourists flocked to Miami each year to see what all the excitement was about.

Miami's growth continued despite the collapse of the South Florida real estate boom and the arrival of the Great Depression. With the population of metro Miami (contiguous with Dade County) rocketing from 43,000 in 1920 to 268,000 in 1940, a growth rate of more than 520 percent, the emerging Sun Belt metropolis headed the ranks of the nation's fastestgrowing cities in the decades before World War II. The physical environment of the Miami area imposed both opportunity and constraint. Urban development was limited by the boundaries of the ocean on the east and the Everglades to the west, ultimately squeezing human settlement into a 10- to 20-mile, north-south sliver of built-up territory. In addition to tourism, new workers were attracted by an expanding service economy, a vibrant building trades sector, and the rise of an important agricultural base in citrus and vegetables, enhancing the city's permanent population. Climate and geography provided the base for the development of subtropical agriculture, tourism, recreation, and retirement.

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