Miami. Jan Nijman
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Название: Miami
Автор: Jan Nijman
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Учебная литература
Серия: Metropolitan Portraits
isbn: 9780812207026
isbn:
The boom of the 1920s was accompanied by fast population growth. Between 1920 and 1930, Dade County’s population increased from 43,000 to 143,000 and Broward’s from 5,000 to 20,000. Many cities were incorporated in both counties: Coral Gables, Hialeah, Miami Springs, Opa Locka, North Miami, South Miami, North Miami Beach, Golden Beach, Davie, Deerfield Beach, Hallandale, Hollywood, Lauderdale by the Sea, and Oakland Park. The most spectacular growth was in Miami Beach: between 1920 and 1930 its population increased by 1,000 percent from 644 to 6,500. These numbers did not include the winter population on the Beach, which was estimated at 40,000 in 1925.8 In the same year the number of hotels on Miami Beach had increased to 234. South Florida, and especially the Beach, became an important destination for seasonal migrants and snowbirds from the north. Most of the hotels opened in the winter only. The present-day Wolfsonian Museum on Collins Avenue (1927) was originally built as a summer storage facility for the winter visitors.
Land prices on Miami Beach went up 1,800 percent between 1916 and 1925. So much money was poured into South Florida that it drained a couple of Massachusetts banks and caused them to fail. Seven banks in Ohio joined forces to launch an advertising campaign blasting Florida.9 A very large percentage of investment was speculative and sometimes land would change hands several times a day. It was only a matter of time before the bubble would burst.
Figure 9. Biscayne Boulevard, downtown Miami, around 1930. State Archives of Florida.
By August 1925, the market started to stagnate and prices moved downward for about twelve months. Then, on September 18, 1926, a devastating category-4 hurricane struck Miami head-on. The number of dead was estimated at 350 and the material damage was enormous. On Miami Beach, one in four houses was destroyed and the area east of Washington Avenue was almost completely flattened. On the mainland, too, the storm wreaked havoc. It caused irreparable damage to Flagler’s Royal Palm Hotel, which had to be taken down. Thousands of investors pulled out, the market collapsed, and many left the area.
Miami went into a depression a few years before the rest of the nation did with the stock market crash of 1929. Those fortunes not already wiped out by the hurricane were destroyed by the stock market crash. Merrick went broke and spent his last years as Miami’s U.S. postmaster. Glenn Curtiss died in debt in New York in 1930. Carl Fisher lost almost everything, moved into a modest cottage on Miami Beach, and drank himself to death in 1939. Looking back at his adventures in South Florida, he said, “It wasn’t any goddamned dream at all. I could just as easily have started a cattle ranch.”10
Figure 10. Aerial view of downtown Miami, 1939. State Archives of Florida.
Miami was anything but a cohesive community. There must have been a high turnover of residents, many did not stay during the summer months, and class differences were huge. In addition, the population was divided along racial and ethnic lines, and blatant discrimination was commonplace. Miami’s elite was an exclusive WASP community. Southern racists dominated much of the police force, and anti-Semitic northerners kept Jews from buying land or registering at many hotels.11
Along with the rising demand for labor, the black population kept growing. An area north of the town center and west of the railroad was designated for blacks and in 1911 a “color line” was drawn to restrict its expansion. This area would be named Colored Town, later renamed Overtown. By 1915 it housed some five thousand people. Another dense pocket of black settlers was the so-called McFarlane subdivision in west Coconut Grove, where Bahamian immigrants built their homes. White protests against black expansion into adjacent neighborhoods were fierce and usually effective—the black areas were among the most densely populated. There was no question where the major newspapers stood on this matter: a 1911 Miami Herald article stated that “the advance of the Negro population is like a plague and carries devastation with it to all surrounding property.”12
In 1917, a group of whites bombed the Odd Fellows Hall, the black community center on Charles Avenue in Coconut Grove. The guilty parties were never arrested. A few years later the Ku Klux Klan established a Miami branch; by 1925 it claimed to have fifteen hundred members.13 In 1921, the Klan kidnapped the black minister H. H. Higgs from Coconut Grove in response to his message aimed at racial equality. He was released after promising to return to the Bahamas. The Klan was known to be closely associated with members of the police force and the force itself was notorious for its rough treatment of blacks.14 An early postcard from the 1920s shows a festive image of the KKK float in a parade on Flagler Street—the American Legion decided to give the Klan the award for best float of the year.15 In the summer of 1926, the Ku Klux Klan opened a new headquarters in downtown Miami at S.W. 4th Street and 8th Avenue. It was destroyed a few months later in the hurricane of September 1926—what some must have considered divine intervention. But open racism and discrimination would continue for many more years, with repeated efforts by city leaders (including, for example, George Merrick) to resettle blacks in completely segregated communities further from the city center.16
The exclusion of blacks from Miami’s designs in this era became painfully evident with the discovery of a historic cemetery in April 2009. The site, at N.W. 71st Street and 4th Avenue, dates to around 1920. Located outside the emerging towns of the time, it served as the final resting place of black Bahamian immigrants, most of whom were construction workers. But its existence was subsequently erased from the records and the site was not marked on any known maps—until ninety years later when a construction crew working on a housing project stumbled upon human bones.17
Figure 11. Woman at a sign for South Florida’s only beach for colored people on Virginia Key; the sign was blown down by a storm in 1950. State Archives of Florida.
Blacks were not the only targets of bigotry. Jews were shunned and systematically excluded from buying real estate. Flagler, for example, was known to refuse to deal with Jewish clients. The situation in Miami Beach was particularly harsh. When Collins and Fisher developed Miami Beach, part of the design was to keep the area “exclusive.” They marketed their real estate sales mainly to wealthy midwesterners. The Lummus brothers, who owned the Miami Beach area south of 5th Street, started to assume a more liberal posture in the early 1920s, selling property to middle-class Jews from New Jersey and New York. Among them was one Joe Weiss, who bought himself a small lunch stand and later turned it into a restaurant named Joe’s Stonecrabs—one of the best-known restaurants to this day.
The first synagogue in Miami was built in 1913 and the event marked the assertion of the Jewish community in Dade County. By 1926, there were about thirteen hundred Jews in the city of Miami. In Miami Beach, there were no more than a few hundred, and the first synagogue was not built until 1927, on the corner of 3rd Street and Washington Avenue. It is said that almost every Jew who was a permanent resident of Miami Beach between 1927 and 1932 was a member of and a financial contributor to the synagogue.18 The central and northern parts of Miami Beach continued as the domain of wealthy gentiles, and some hotels even posted signs indicating that Jews were not welcome until such signs СКАЧАТЬ