About Miami Beach Florida...
Early in the 20th century, a few farsighted
tycoons, most from the Midwest, who had 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.