Miami. Jan Nijman

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СКАЧАТЬ way Miami’s urban society evolved seemed to set a pattern that, with some variation, is still with us today. A strong sense of community was forged among some of the less powerful segments of South Florida’s population, particularly blacks and Jews. These communities had a strong ethnic base, lived in highly segregated neighborhoods, and developed a sense of local identity.¹⁹ The business elite, in contrast, seemed to have a more loose association with Miami. They viewed it as a business opportunity, rather than a place to live, and they usually held on to homes elsewhere. Their prosperity fostered individualism; their mobility withheld local community membership.

      And then there was Miami’s flourishing underworld. Like most frontier towns, Miami around the turn of the century was an environment conducive to lawlessness and crime. In the 1920s, Prohibition and the real estate boom combined to turn crime into organized business. Miami became a major port of entry for alcohol smuggling, mainly from the Bahamas, as well as an ideal area for local moonshine distilleries. With its yacht clubs, regattas, glamorous hotels, racehorse track, and gambling parlors, Miami was obviously a thirsty and lucrative market as well. That market got even bigger when the real estate boom lured large numbers of investors to town.

      Miami blatantly ignored Prohibition and some of Miami’s “best citizens” were engaged in rum running.²⁰ It was common knowledge, for example, that in Flagler’s Royal Palm Hotel you could have any drink money could buy. Carl Fisher, who himself became a heavy drinker during Prohibition, threw extravagant parties with abundant refreshments for out-of-town clients and friends. Alcohol was routinely delivered to the wealthy on their yachts. According to one account, “Limousines [were] lined up at the wharfs to welcome the boats laden with bootleg liquor that came in from Havana, Bimini, Nassau, and people drove off with their ‘fish’ neatly wrapped in brown paper. At other times, that ‘fish’ was shipped north in refrigerated railroad cars, under cover of grapefruit, tomatoes or avocados.”²¹

      The mob was well represented among the new groups of snowbirds arriving in the 1920s. Al Capone drew Miami into his Chicago-based crime network and made millions. In 1928 he bought a mansion on Palm Island, his winter home until he could no longer avoid prison in 1932. The mob engaged mainly in smuggling, gambling, and prostitution, but it also infiltrated legitimate business, including real estate, construction, hotels, and nightclubs. Members of the mob were said to be working quite comfortably with the sheriffs from Dade and Broward counties.²² From the mid- to late 1920s, the murder rate for South Florida was greater than at any time since the State of Florida began keeping records and it was much higher than the U.S. average. “It would appear that there was a … culture that promoted violence…. This culture was fueled by the stress created by the boom and the bust and by the large numbers of transients who had no permanent roots in the community.”²³ From the ethnic schisms and pervasive bigotry to its criminal underbelly, it appears that Miami’s social fabric in the 1920s was as fragmented as it was fragile.

      South Florida entered the Great Depression before the rest of the country and it recovered sooner as well—even if it did not return to the high-rolling times of the 1920s. Tourism picked up again in the early 1930s. For those who could afford it, Miami continued to have a special appeal. In addition, the real estate bust of the late 1920s now allowed people to buy land at cheaper rates. Population turnover continued to be very high: in 1940, about one-third of the resident population had arrived only since 1935.²⁴

      Once again, some of the most eye-catching developments took place in Miami Beach. The need for new large-scale construction in eastern Miami Beach after the hurricane of 1926 coincided with the arrival of a new type of design and architecture. Stylish modernism originated in France and was highly influential in the 1920s and 1930s. By the time it reached Miami Beach it had evolved into streamline moderne, with simpler structures and machine-inspired, industrial forms. Later, in the 1960s, this style became popularly known as art deco. The deco district in south Miami Beach, about eight hundred buildings in one square mile, was put up in less than ten years. It includes well-known hotels such as the Tides (1936), the Beacon (1936), Essex House (1938), the Breakwater (1939), and the Avalon (1941). The most exquisite art deco building is probably the U.S. Post Office building (1937) on Washington Avenue and 13th Street. The district also included many apartments and served mainly tourists, as it does today.

      Among the newcomers to Miami Beach were many Jews who settled mainly in the southern parts of the island but soon started moving farther north as well. The Jewish population on the Beach went from about 300 in the mid-1920s to 3,300 in 1935. The main push occurred between 1945 and 1950 when their numbers tripled in only five years. The Jewish population in Dade County as a whole increased from 8,273 in 1940 to almost 55,000 in 1950.

      Miami Beach’s early and vigorous recovery was reflected in the fact that its total population quadrupled in the course of the 1930s. In 1940 the number stood at 28,000 and by 1950 it would reach 46,000. On the mainland, population growth and urban expansion continued steadily. During World War II, Dade County housed several air and naval bases, with a total of 80,000 soldiers stationed in Miami and in Miami Beach. A popular saying went that many had “felt the sand in their shoes” and returned to live there after the war. The overall population of Dade County roughly doubled during the 1930s, again during the 1940s, and once more during the 1950s. Broward’s population doubled as well in the 1930s and 1940s, and then quadrupled in the 1950s to reach 334,000 in 1960. The introduction of air conditioning in many middle- and upper-class homes since the late 1940s (and central air since the mid-1950s) played a part in this growth just as it did in other cities in the U.S. Sun Belt.

      The South Florida urban region grew more dense and expanded south, north, and west. Fifteen new cities were incorporated and hundreds of new subdivisions emerged in the two-county area during this period. But Miami and Fort Lauderdale remained dominant within their counties and had by far the largest population concentrations. Major infrastructure developments included the creation of Miami International Airport²⁵ in 1949, the expansion of the port of Miami through the annexation of Dodge Island in 1956, the beginning of construction of interstate highways across South Florida in the late 1950s, and the opening of Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport in 1959.

      But while South Florida grew rapidly in the postwar years, the essence of Miami did not really change. It continued to function as a sort of appendage to the nation but it had not (yet) acquired most of the traits typical of major cities elsewhere:

       Miami’s postwar decades, bracketed by the return of the GIs beginning in 1944 and the Republican Convention of 1968, witnessed a dramatic demographic increase and a radical mutation from seasonal resort to year-round metropolitan environment. Yet, unlike Los Angeles, Miami continued to be defined in relation to other places (more as a playground for escapees, transient or not, from the industrial northern and mid-western cities) than as a city in its own right. This perception shaped Miami’s status as a commodified “city of leisure.” … [Further, the city’s] infantile and innocent character was exacerbated by the body culture, tropical weather, beaches, golf courses and other amenities. [Miami was a] city of recreation versus a city of culture, a city of attractions versus a city of institutions.26

      The environmental transformation of South Florida that began at the beginning of the twentieth century continued apace. Drainage of the Everglades accelerated after the major flooding caused by the hurricane of 1926. The construction of the Tamiami Trail in 1928 was probably the single most environmentally destructive project in South Florida’s history. It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. The 112-mile long canal helped transport “surplus” water east to the Atlantic and west to the Gulf of Mexico. The dike protected urban areas against flooding, and the road on the dike was the first major east-west connection between Miami and Tampa.

      The Tamiami Trail also (very) effectively blocked the “river of grass” from flowing south. It dried out much of the Everglades and killed a variety of plants, birds, fish, mammals, amphibians, and reptiles. The growing agriculture sector compounded the problem СКАЧАТЬ