Paradise for Sale

by Nick Wynne

  In 1911, he negotiated a contract with the Chicago Street Railway Company and, in the course of the negotiations, agreed to purchase Useppa Island from the president of the company, John M. Roach. Collier was enchanted and visited Useppa frequently. He also purchased a sizeable orange grove located in the extreme southern end of Lee County from Roach. Near the present-day Everglades City, the raw, undeveloped subtropical landscapes situated on the very edge of the great Everglades “captured Barron Collier’s soul,” as Charles E. Harner, author of Florida’s Promoters: The Men Who Made It Big, wrote. The area certainly motivated him to add more and more land to his Florida holdings.

  Walter Fuller, a St. Petersburg real estate dealer and co-owner of the streetcar company in that city, met Collier several years earlier when he and his father had agreed to change their advertising contract from a Tampa-based printing company to Collier’s company. When he heard Collier was interested in buying more land in the Sunshine State, Fuller put together a tract of some 400,000 acres of farmland in northern Lee County. When he presented his proposal to Collier, it was rejected. Barron Collier was not looking for developed land at all; what he wanted was raw, wild land that he could “make into a place where people [could] live.” He did just that. Between 1921 and 1923, he amassed more than 1.5 million acres of swamplands and cypress forests in southern Lee County.

  Collier centered his operations in the small hamlet of Everglade, a quaint fishing and trading village with a population of fewer than twelve families. He immediately brought in dredges to pump fill dirt to raise the town site a few feet above the surrounding swamp. The nearby Allen River was rechristened the Barron River, and a phalanx of surveyors, architects, planners and landscapers began to systematically lay out docks, railroad depots, warehouses, streets and homesites. Within a few months, he poured enough money into the town to change it from a one-horse town to a bustling town with its own power plant and city water supply, a two-room schoolhouse, a medical clinic, a movie theatre and a forty-five-room hotel presided over by Claus Senghaas, a Bavarian chef Collier convinced to immigrate to Florida. The Manhattan Mercantile Corporation, owned by Collier, quickly established a large mercantile store, gas station and petroleum storage facility, which wholesaled gasoline to other stores in the area. To ensure quick and easy communications with his New York–based advertising business, Collier paid for the stringing of telephone and telegraph wires between Everglade (now called Everglades) and Fort Myers. On July 9, 1923, the Bank of Everglades was opened.

  The greatest difficulty facing residents of the new town was that of actually getting to it. No roads and very few crude trails existed. James Franklin Jaudon, the Miami tax assessor who owned property in Monroe County, urged the state to build a road from Tampa to Miami (the Tamiami Trail) to link the east and west coasts. Although construction started in 1915, construction on the north–south portion of the highway came to a halt in 1919 when Lee County could not come up with the funds to pay for any more work. The project was revived in 1921 when Jaudon formed the Chevalier Corporation and agreed to fund the completion of the road if the route was changed to go through Monroe County. In 1922, the state also ran out of funds to pay for the east–west portion of the roadway.

  With construction halted on the east–west portion of the Tamiami Trail, Barron Collier stepped in. He invited Governor John W. Martin and Fons Hathaway, the chairman of the State Road Board, to a dinner at his home on Useppa Island. The next morning, Governor Martin announced that an agreement had been reached between the men. In exchange for splitting a portion of Lee County off from the whole and creating a new county—90 percent of which was made up of the more than 1 million acres of Collier land—to be called Collier County, and rerouting the road to run through the new county, the developer agreed to fund the final leg (some seventy-six miles) of construction.

  With the new roadway under construction, Collier went about completing his plans for making Everglades (now referred to as Everglades City to distinguish it from the Everglades proper) a major port city on Florida’s east coast. David Graham Copeland, Collier’s engineer, went to work converting the town into a base of operations for the construction crews. An industrial section of the town, Port du Pont, contained barracks and mess halls for workers in the town, sawmills, boatyards and machine shops. While Collier’s development of Everglades City proceeded, so, too, did construction on the first “Alligator Alley.”

  Although much of the surveying for the route had been done earlier, it was necessary to resurvey some parts because the markers had disappeared. A canal, approximately twenty-four feet wide and twelve feet deep, was dynamited out of the Everglades muck. Workers toiled in two ten-hour-a-day shifts, living in temporary shelters and earning only twenty cents a day for their efforts. Turnover was a constant problem and approached 50 percent a month. Workers injured on the job—and accidents were frequent—had to be transported miles across swampy terrain to receive medical attention. Nevertheless, work progressed, often measured in a few feet or a few yards a day. The costs reached astronomical heights, with one estimate of the final cost placed at $25,000 a mile.

  The road opened officially on April 26, 1928, two years after the end of the boom. Still, Barron Collier thought it was money well spent. Even though many Florida promoters—Fisher, Davis, Mizner and Merrick—were finished financially by then, Collier was still making an estimated $14,000 a day on his various enterprises, excluding his Florida land developments. By 1933, however, even the once recession-proof advertising business was in the toilet. Time magazine reported in its June 22 issue that year:

  The Tamiami Trail, a road stretching through southwest Florida across the Everglades to Miami, was the brainchild of James F. Jaudon of Miami. Although construction started on the road in 1915, it was stop-and-go until Collier agreed to finish it in 1923. Courtesy of the Tampa-Hillsborough County Library System.

  Last week in Tampa, Fla. Barron Gift Collier, famed organizer of car card advertising, virtually declared himself bankrupt. He did not use the exact word. What he said was that he could not pay all his debts immediately and wanted a moratorium. He thus became the first U.S. tycoon to take advantage of the new bankruptcy law which President [Herbert] Hoover signed the day before he left office.

  He might have been bankrupt, but he was not broke. Against an estate of some $37 million, he owed $9 million to his various companies and $4.5 million to banks and other creditors. In his Florida portfolio alone were fourteen hotels, three newspapers, a construction company, a mercantile company, the Florida Railroad and Navigation Company, the Inter-County Telephone & Telegraph Company, the Bank of Everglades, an assortment of smaller companies and land—lots and lots of land. Although he had not paid all of his debts by the time of his death in 1939, he remained the largest single landowner in the state. A major participant in the Florida boom, Collier’s fate (and good fortune) was to avoid investing millions more in subdivisions. His descendants have profited from his accumulation of Florida lands and continue to do so today.

  Glenn Hammond Curtiss became associated with the Miami area in 1912, when he accepted an invitation from local businessman E.G. Sewell to open an aviation school in the city. Curtiss was a well-known figure in American aviation, ranking only behind the Wright brothers. During World War I, his factories produced the famous Curtiss JN04, better known as the “Jenny,” which was used to train the majority of American pilots. He was also the innovator of naval aviation, successfully demonstrating how airplanes could take off from the decks of naval ships. In 1919, a Curtiss-designed NC-4 “flying boat” made the first transatlantic crossing. (The city of Miami Springs’ official website states that he received the Congressional Medal of Honor [1930] for his work in World War I, but this has been disputed by a number of sources, which found no record of the award.)

  In 1916, he moved the school north of the city on land donated by rancher James Bright. He and Bright formed a partnership and soon operated the Curtiss-Bright Ranch tog
ether. For five years, the ranch was the largest dairy and poultry farm in the area. In 1921, the two men decided to take advantage of the boom in development and converted parts of their vast holdings into three residential communities: Hialeah, Country Club Estates (later Miami Springs) and Opa-locka.

  Glenn H. Curtiss, an aircraft manufacturer and pilot, introduced Pueblo or Mission Revival architecture for his development of Hialeah. Very few untrained persons could tell the difference between this style of architecture and variations of the more plentiful Mediterranean Revival buildings. Courtesy of the Florida Historical Society.

  Hialeah, billed as the “Gateway to the Everglades,” was built on ecologically fragile acres carved from the edge of the Everglades. Courtesy of the Florida Historical Society.

  Buyers had a variety of choices for the exteriors of their homes. The new city of Hialeah (incorporated in 1925) featured a predominance of Mission-style architecture, which was different from the Mediterranean Revival style that became the hallmark of boom-era developments. As the developers, Curtiss and Bright donated land for schools, churches and other community buildings, but, as one writer put it, Hialeah went “honky-tonk.” Advertised as the “Gateway to the Everglades,” the city was home to a number of gambling establishments, including a greyhound racetrack, a jockey club and thoroughbred track, a jai alai fronton, an amusement park and numerous nightclubs and juke joints. “Hialeah rye,” dispensed across South Florida by countless bootleggers and bartenders, became a favorite with Floridians deprived of more traditional brands of liquor by Prohibition. Although Curtiss and Bright had envisioned Hialeah as “Hometown, USA,” the Jazz Age, Prohibition and the land boom moved the town in a different direction.

  Curtiss’s second development, Country Club Estates, was a more family-oriented community. Broad boulevards, lined with Australian pines, led to a small business district with a circular plaza. A restrictive building code required that all homes built in the development be consistent with the Pueblo style of architecture, meet certain setbacks from the street and have a backyard and prohibited industrial and commercial development. Three golf courses, built around a luxurious clubhouse, provided residents and their guests with a great opportunity to play the game on tournament-quality courses—one of which was designed by Miami golfer Thomas “Tubby” Palmer. Adjacent to the Curtiss aviation school, which would later become Miami International Airport, the development was popular with aficionados of flying. By 1926, some 135 homes, the Pueblo Hotel and the country club were complete. The community was incorporated that year.

  Glenn Curtiss’s third major development, Opa-locka, featured Persian Revival architecture. The story goes that Curtiss, who was impressed with One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, the book he was reading, sent it to his New York architect, Bernhardt E. Muller, to use as the template for the new development. As a result, Muller created “the Baghdad of Dade County,” a collection of private and public buildings with domes, spires, minarets and parapets. Street names came directly from the book—Sesame Street, Ali Baba Avenue, Caliph Street, Previz Avenue, Azure Way. Although Curtiss wanted one street named for the heroine of the book, Scheherazade, his marketing staff persuaded him that the name was too difficult to spell and even more difficult to pronounce, so it was shortened to Sherazad Boulevard, which often was confused with another street, Sharar Avenue. Today, many of the homes and public buildings that made up Opa-locka are on the National Registry of Historic Places.

  After Hialeah took on an unsavory character, Glenn Curtiss and partner James Bright developed Country Club Estates (now Miami Springs), which featured three golf courses surrounding a magnificent clubhouse. Courtesy of the Historical Association of Southern Florida.

  Although the downturn in land sales in 1926 had some impact on Curtiss’s development, he determined to keep developing his communities. Unlike other promoters, his fortune—much like that of Barron Collier—came in large part from his manufacturing concerns, particularly his aircraft factories. Even so, by late 1927 and early 1928, it became apparent that the boom was over and Florida real estate would not recover for quite a while.

  Joseph Wesley Young, a transplant from California, arrived in South Florida in January 1920 with a vision of creating a “Dream City in Florida,” where the arts, particularly movie making, would dominate the life of the town. He was confident that he could buy, build and sell a “city for everyone—from the opulent at the top of the industrial and social ladder to the most humble of working people.” He planned a city of broad boulevards—capable of handling twelve cars abreast—bordered by man-made lakes. Three large circles, roughly ten acres each, would provide space for a community park, a government center and a military academy. He created the Hollywood Land and Water Company, which was divided into twenty-six departments, to handle all aspects of developing his new town and to establish strict regulations to govern the kinds of buildings and enterprises to be allowed. Theatres, schools and churches, all part of the master plan for the city, provided a solid moral and intellectual basis for its residents. A thirty-foot-wide concrete promenade paralleled the beach for a mile and a half and provided residents and visitors a chance to stroll the shores of the Atlantic Ocean in comfort. The boardwalk was home to Florida’s largest bathing pavilion, which had 824 dressing rooms, eighty showers, a shopping arcade and an Olympic-sized swimming pool. In February 1926, the Hollywood Beach Hotel opened. It was seven stories high and had 500 individual rooms with private baths. Built at a cost of $3 million, it boasted a direct wire connection with the New York Stock Exchange, which kept the northern industrialists and investors, who made it a favorite retreat, in touch with the activities of Wall Street. With its solarium, reputed to be the world’s largest, and its fancy ballrooms, the Hollywood Beach Hotel quickly became the social center for local elites. The Hollywood Golf and Country Club, built in the early 1920s, featured a championship golf course and an opulent clubhouse with a large open courtyard that could be covered during inclement weather.

  When Joseph Young took stock of his creation in January 1926, he counted more than twenty-four hundred private homes, thirty-six apartment buildings, 252 business buildings, nine hotels either completed or under construction and a permanent population of eighteen thousand residents. His original one-square-mile city had grown to eighteen thousand acres and claimed six and a half miles of oceanfront. Nothing, it appeared, could go wrong!

  Weedon Island, now recognized as an important site for prehistoric settlement based on the 1923–24 excavations conducted by Jesse Walter Fewkes of the Smithsonian Institution, was a part of the boom development craze. Eugene Elliot and his partners attempted to make the island the “Riviera of Florida,” offering large lots at low prices. The centerpiece of the development was the Narvaez Dance Club, a speakeasy that offered prospective buyers a chance to drink until they were ready to buy. Not a lot of buyers wanted lots on the island because of its remote location and the difficulty getting to it, but Elliot’s speakeasy did a booming business. When it mysteriously burned one night (some say because of rivalries between competing bootleggers who wanted to supply hooch to the club), he immediately rebuilt and called his new club the San Remo, which was bigger and grander than the original. A fifty-foot tower attached to the club overlooked the entire island. When the development market collapsed in 1926, Elliot lost his island. Although the First National Bank of Tampa, which held title to the island, offered to sell it to the City of St. Petersburg for use as a park, the city could not afford it. In 1929, the bank failed and the island passed to Fred Blair and a group of investors. They immediately began construction of the Grand Central Airport, which opened in 1930. In January 1931, Eastern Air Transport (Eastern Airlines) made the airport its national headquarters and provided the first commercial air service between St. Petersburg and Tampa. From the Grand Central, Eastern also offered air service to major northern cities.

  The Hollywood Golf and Country Club featured a large open patio where patrons
could dance under the stars. The patio was covered by a canvas roof during inclement weather, and the dances could go on. Courtesy of the Moorhead Collection.

  William J. Howey, son of a circuit-riding minister and his wife, was born on January 19, 1876, in Odin, Illinois. At age sixteen, he entered the business world as an insurance salesman, and by 1900, he was a top producer for three companies. At age twenty-four, he went to work developing land and towns for railroads in Oklahoma. In 1903, he opened the Howey Automobile Company in Kansas City, but after making only seven automobiles, he closed the business and went to Perez, Mexico, where he bought a large tract of land. He hoped to develop pineapple plantations with the help of American capitalists, but the Mexican Revolution in 1907 forced him to abandon the venture and move back to the United States and Florida.

  Howey was intrigued by the prospects of becoming a citrus grower and perfected his citrus farming skills in the Winter Haven area, where he cultivated citrus groves. In addition, he bought and sold land for new developments. In 1910, he began a second project at Lake Hamilton. He also developed raw land in Dundee and Star Lake. He planned to erect his home on the site where Bok Tower now stands in Polk County, near the famous Mountain Lake Golf Course. However, his focus changed, and in 1914, Howey began buying land in Lake County, which he envisioned as the site for a planned development that he optimistically called the “City Inevitable.” Although the entry of the United States into World War I slowed the implementation of his grand design, he pressed forward, and by 1920, he had assembled about sixty thousand raw acres. Bill Howey purchased raw land for $8 to $10 per acre and sold it for $800 to $2,000 per acre after it was cleared and planted with citrus trees.