The birth of the city was largely the result of the money and persistence of one man, a wealthy northern industrialist, Carl Fisher. He had a vision, combined with an appetite for risk taking, to believe that the barren and inhospitable land could be developed into a first class tourist resort. In an age before the introduction of air-conditioning, making such a huge bet on a virtual swampland set in a tropical heat zone, was no small gamble. But Fisher believed he could recreate the glitzy Palm Beach, two hours north of Miami Beach. There, another northern mogul, Henry Flagler, had crafted a resort that had become a winter haven for America’s super rich.
In 1915 when Miami Beach was incorporated as a town, Fisher had used dredging and landfill to almost triple the size of the sandbar from 1600-acres to 4400. It had only 33 registered voters, 30 of whom lived on one of Fisher’s new housing developments. And he became …show more content…
After the war, many soldiers moved there with their families. By 1950, the Beach’s population had nearly doubled from a decade earlier. And it marked the start of a grand era with the opening of Morris Lapidus’s extravagant Fontainebleau and later the neighboring Eden Roc. Frank Sinatra and his Rat Pack became regulars. So did some top gangsters, including Mafia captains from New York, Detroit, Philadelphia and Cleveland. The country’s top Jewish mobster, Meyer Lansky, ran his operations out of a nondescript hotel on Collins