Miami Florida Information

Early in the 20th century, a few farsighted tycoons, most from the Midwest, who'd made their fortunes in the burgeoning automobile industry, separately conceived an idea for a new playground for the leisure class. Among their most preposterous projects was the dredging of Biscayne Bay to create a man-made beach paradise offshore the new, elegant, tiny city of Miami-which itself was created from a mangrove swamp.

Elegant homes were built along the new white-sand bulkheads of this beautiful engineered island for those lucky enough to afford them. There were some unforeseen additional benefits to the dredging of the bay and filling in of the sandpit-cum-mangrove swamp that had been the foundation of the new beachfront.

Mosquitoes and sand flies no longer had a place to breed. High-stakes yacht races could be staged in the new deep water of Biscayne Bay, formerly a shallow lagoon.

The great humorist Will Rogers was to write later about the playboy tycoon who largely built Miami Beach, Carl Fisher: "He was the first man smart enough to discover that there was sand under all that water. So he put in a kind of dredge, an 'all-day sucker' arrangement, and he brought the sand up and let the water go to the bottom instead of the top. Up to then sand had been used to build with, but never upon. Carl discovered that sand could hold up a real estate sign, and that was all he wanted it for. Carl rowed the customers out in the ocean and let them pick out some nice smooth water where they would like to build, and then he would replace the water with an island, and you would be a little Robinson Crusoe of your own."