The story of Miami Beach is a remarkable one and without it Miami would scarcely be able to get out gaudy prospectuses with pictures of beautifully shaped ladies in red one-piece bathing suits on the covers. This is the way of it:

Miami’s palm-shaded streets run down to the shores of Biscayne Bay, which is a strip of water some seven miles long and between two and three miles wide. Between the bay and the ocean is a long narrow tongue of land, not much over a mile in width at its widest point. Prior to 1913, ninety-nine per cent. of this narrow tongue of land was a worthless jungle. The man who owned it is said to have bought it for twelve thousand dollars. The only way of reaching it was by ferry boat, and there was nothing on it in the line of a winter resort except a bathing shack on the beach at the extreme tip, to which a few tourists occasionally repaired when the urge for sea bathing became almost too intense to be endured.

A persistent attempt had been made to utilize the natural advantages of this narrow tongue of sand and jungle. In 1884 some New Jersey business men essayed to plant coconuts on it in sufficient quantities to make the venture profitable. There were no railroads, and it could only be reached by boat. Three shiploads of coconuts were brought from the island of Trinidad. The ships were anchored off the tongue of land; and when the wind blew toward the shore, the coconuts were dumped overboard to float to land. Three hundred and thirty-four thousand coconuts were sent ashore by the promoters of this scheme. They cost five cents apiece in Trinidad, and the freight figured up to six cents apiece. The venture became so costly that the promoters hunted around for more capital and succeeded in interesting a New Jersey fruit-grower named John S. Collins. As a commercial proposition, the coconut planting was a complete failure. But as a flyer in landscape architecture, it was a great success; for the entire ocean-front of the tongue of land was fringed with beautiful coconut palms.

The original coconut planters dropped out as their failure became apparent. Collins and one other man hung on to their narrow and apparently worthless piece of land. In the center of it was some high ground on which Collins conceived the idea of starting a grove of avocados, better known as alligator pears. The avocado shuns frost as an Epworth Leaguer shuns cocktails; and since there is no frost worthy of the name on the tongue of land because of its water-protection on both sides, Collins figured that avocado culture could be made to pay. He was right; and his avocado grove is now the largest in the world. The speed with which he worked, however, didn’t meet the approval of his one remaining partner; so Collins bought him out, becoming the sole owner of the narrow sand-spit with the avocado grove down its backbone.

It then began to dawn on Collins, who was seventy-four years old and therefore able to see a good many things that younger men overlooked, that his sand-spit was a pleasant place on which to live during the winter and summer too, but that he probably couldn’t persuade people to live there until he made it possible for people to get there. Consequently he conceived the idea of building a wooden bridge two and one-half miles in length—the longest vehicle bridge in the world—between Miami and the sand-spit.

The bridge was started in July, 1912; and, as has always been customary in the early developments of Florida, his friends, attorneys and bankers almost had heart-failure over his wild scheme. They prophesied enthusiastically that in about two years’ time he would be standing at the Miami end of his unfinished bridge, begging for nickels with which to get a square meal. The population of Miami at that time was about seven thousand five hundred.

At one time, late in 1912, the amateur prophets were looking gloomily at Collins and saying proudly to each other: “Well, I told him so!” The bridge was such a tremendous undertaking that the Collins money began to pinch out; and no local talent could be found to advance any sum larger than nine dollars on the chance of making a success out of the bridge or the sand-spit.

CHAPTER X

OF THE ARRIVAL OF CARL FISHER IN MIAMI—OF FISHER’S FEVERISH IMAGINATION AND VIOLENT DREAMS—OF THE DESPAIR OF FISHER’S FRIENDS—AND OF THE EVOLUTION OF A JUNGLE

Early in 1913, a wealthy Indianapolis business man named Carl G. Fisher came to Miami for his health. Fisher, from the days when he used to be a news butcher on Indiana trains, was able to see the possibilities in things which every one else regarded as impossibilities. He had always plunged heavily on his beliefs while his friends and acquaintances stood on the side-lines and told one another what a shame it was that Carl had gone bugs. One of his plunges had been the big Indianapolis Speedway—a gigantic structure which does all its business, pays its expenses and makes its profits on one day out of the year.