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.