OF EXPENSIVE EXPENSES AND HEATED ICE-RINKS--OF LILY ON LILY THAT
O’ERPLACE THE SEA--AND OF THE BONEHEADEDNESS OF MOST OF THE HUMAN RACE
In 1913 Miami Beach was an impenetrable jungle on a sand-spit and a
swamp. In 1922 many a water-front lot was being sold for double the
price that was paid for the original jungle not so many years ago.
In place of the sand and the swamp and the jungle there are over forty
miles of street and roads, lined with palms and shrubs. Several hotels
have been built, the largest of which--the Flamingo--looks exactly like
a grain elevator and has the reputation of being the most expensive
winter resort hotel in the world. As a matter of fact, it is no more
expensive than the big Palm Beach hotels--although that is sufficiently
expensive to send the cold shivers up and down the spine of the person
who hasn’t become thoroughly hardened to money-spending. Two people can
have a nice room with bath and all the food they want--in reason--for
forty dollars a day. They can also have free oranges, which somehow
seems to remove some of the numbing pain from the impact of the bill
against the brain. There is no particular reason why it should, as one
can easily drown himself in the juice from a dollar’s worth of oranges.
There are a score and more of apartment-houses, and three hundred and
fifty private residences ranging from unconsciously simple little
ten-thousand-dollar bungalows up to artfully simple little
two-hundred-thousand-dollar cottages.
Within another six years, according to the more sane and conservative
Miami Beach predicters, there will be six or seven more hotels at Miami
Beach, all larger than the Flamingo. Fisher has another modest
caravansary planned which is to have an ice-rink, covered tennis courts
and a tanbark horse-show enclosure on the roof. Unless his friends lock
him up, he is sure to carry out his plans--which will probably be as
highly successful as his past ventures.
A few of his friends no longer fear for his sanity. His former business
partner in Indianapolis, James A. Allison, has even helped the good work
along by building and stocking at Miami Beach an aquarium that rivals
the great aquariums of Monaco, Naples, Honolulu and Manila. A great many
of his friends, however, still shake their heads pityingly when they
hear mention of hotels with ice-rinks on the roof.
The dredging operations which had transferred sand from the bottom of
Biscayne Bay to the top of Miami Beach had left several unsightly mud
banks protruding a few inches from the surface of the bay. Fisher
surrounded these mud banks with bulkheads and pumped more mud into
them. The result was seven beautiful islands, most of which are already
shaded by palm groves and dotted with simple but beautiful homes costing
about thirty dollars a square inch. They are easy of access, since they
are connected with the mainland or the causeway.
Some Miami people have likened these islands to lilies which o’erlace
the sea, after the fashion of Senator Lodge quoting from Browning in an
attempt to explain the islands of the Pacific to a concourse of
hard-boiled hearers; but Palm Beach folk, with that peculiar jealousy
evinced by the residents of one Florida resort toward everything in a
rival Florida resort, say that they look more like floating flapjacks.
The truth, of course, lies between; and when they are covered with
masses of tropical foliage, there will be nothing flapjackish about
them. One of the islands, together with an obelisk rising from its
center, was constructed as a memorial to Henry M. Flagler, without whose
vision and foresight Florida would probably only be known as the place
that Florida Water was named after. One of the largest islands has an
area of sixty acres. A mile of bulkhead, with bulkheading at twelve
dollars a foot, was necessary in its construction, and its total cost
was half a million dollars.
The inability of ninety per cent. of the human race to see how a thing
is going to look when finished has cost the human race a large amount of
money at Miami Beach. Not long ago, for example, an effort was made to
sell a new house for sixteen thousand dollars. It stood on new flat
land, however, and there were no trees or shrubs around it. Everybody
who saw it refused to buy it; so three thousand five hundred dollars was
spent in planting grass, palms and flowers and adding walks and a
boathouse. When this had been done, the house sold instantly for thirty
thousand dollars to one of the men who had refused to pay sixteen
thousand for it the preceding year.