Dade County FlArchives History - Books .....The Boom Comes, Chapter 13 1965 ************************************************ Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://www.usgwarchives.net/fl/flfiles.htm ************************************************ File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by: Joy Fisher http://www.genrecords.net/emailregistry/vols/00001.html#0000031 April 5, 2009, 4:38 pm Book Title: Memories Of Old Miami CHAPTER THIRTEEN The Boom Comes THE Boom of 1924-26 was as big as Florida, M but its influence was as big as the United *- S States. Looking back, I often find it difficult to believe my own memories of what I saw and what I experienced. At the height of the Boom there was six billion dollars in circulation in the United States and five billion of it was circulating in Florida. People pulled their savings out of banks all over the country and sent the money to Florida. Everybody wanted to own a piece of this fabulous state. Bankers became alarmed. So did northern newspapers and national magazines. But warnings went unheeded. Money kept flowing across the Georgia line. We ran out of land early. But we solved this by selling the same land over and over. The same piece of property would go through the hands of a dozen "binder boys" in 30 days. Miami property brought fantastic prices - up to $30,-000 an acre for unimproved land. Swamps were cut up into lots and sold. Thousands bought land they never would see. They couldn't even find it. If the Okefenokee Swamp had been in Florida it would have been subdivided and sold. By the middle of 1925 we had enough building lots in Florida for just about every family in the Americas and in Europe. Every farm, every cattle ranch, every citrus grove would soon be covered with houses. Skyscrapers would rise in the Everglades. The beaches would be lined with fine hotels, casinos and the homes of multi-millionaires. And multi-millionaires we had aplenty. People like George E. Merrick were looked upon as being fabulously wealthy. I remember hearing Mrs. Merrick's wealth estimated at 100 million dollars. The Boom did strange things to people. William Jennings Bryan left the pulpit and devoted his silver tongue to help Mr. Merrick sell Coral Gables. For this he was paid $100,000 a year. I remember though, that Mr. Bryan took time out to journey up to Tennessee to debate with the famous Clarence Darrow in the Scopes trial. Darrow made a monkey out of him and he died less than a week later. There were signs that the Boom was getting under way in 1923, the year that I was married. I was advertising manager for the Miami Labor News, and I was selling more ads every month. In 1924 I went to work for my brother, John, who was in the real estate business. On Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday I was selling ads for the newspaper and the rest of the week I was one of the "binder boys." We have nothing today equivalent to the "binder boy." As a binder boy you bought a property this morning by paying five per cent down, with an agreement to close the deal in 30 days, and in the afternoon you peddled the property for a higher price. At the height of the Boom I was earning $160 a week selling ads and even more selling land. My biggest single deal was the sale of an eight-unit apartment house at NW 11th Avenue and Third Street for $57,500. I received 60 per cent of a $2,750 commission. Florida had a population of about 1,200,000; but Miami, which could boast only 30,000 people in 1920, in 1925 claimed over 100,000 for "Greater Miami." Everybody expected Miami to have a million people within 10 years. Packed trains brought hundreds of new people to Miami daily. The Florida East Coast unloaded up to 75 Pullmans a day at its depot near where a new skyscraper courthouse was being erected. People were pouring in at the rate of 2,000 a day. The Seaboard had extended its line to West Palm Beach and Miami was clamoring for President S. Davies Warfield to extend the line to the Magic City. Miami's skyline looked like a whole new city under construction - and it was. The first skyscraper the 10-story McAllister Hotel, had just been completed in 1919. Now the steel frameworks of new skyscrapers were rising all over the downtown section. The noise of rivet hammers rang in our ears all day. Traffic congestion became so great that H. H. (Honk-Honk) Arnold, the traffic director, had to take the cops out of the middle of the intersections and put up traffic lights; and when this didn't solve the problem Miami got its first one-way streets. Police Chief H. Leslie Quigg had a tough time keeping policemen. So he started importing Georgia plow hands by the dozens. A plow hand lasted on the force about two months. With his first month's pay he bought himself a pair of golf knickers and a pair of wool stockings - the symbol of the successful binder boy - and next month he joined the real estate crowd. Chief Quigg would have to import another load of plow hands. One of the plow hand-policemen didn't quit soon enough. When a jaywalker - who happened to be a binder boy - crossed the street against the wrong light, the policeman drew his shiny revolver and cut him down. I can't remember whether they fired the policeman or gave him a commendation; but in those days the latter would have been in order. When you consider the laws, regulations and restrictions we have today compared with 1925, those Boom years seem a little ridiculous - or the present day does, whichever system you prefer. You didn't have to buy a real estate license and there were no regulations governing real estate sales. All you needed to do was buy an occupational license to set up a business. It was up to the buyer to avoid getting hooked. If he did he was likely to keep it to himself. He certainly couldn't expect any sympathy from the law. We had no such things as zoning and building codes like we have today. The flimsiest kinds of structures were built. People were in a hurry to get shelter. All they asked for was a structure that had walls and a roof. Suppose the house did fall down the next year. By that time the builder would be living in a mansion anyway. There wasn't an empty room in Southeast Florida. Whole families lived in single rooms, so great was the demand for shelter. Trailer parks and tent cities sprung up everywhere. People paid to sleep on cots in hotel hallways and lobbies. Or they slept in railway and bus waiting rooms. Hundreds slept in their cars. In 1925 the chamber of commerce announced that the Miami area had 300,000 winter visitors during the 1924-25 season. That would seem like a small number today, but in 1925 it was fantastic. Miami was attracting people from all over the country and all over the world. The names of Miami and Coral Gables rolled on people's tongues like magic, calling into the imagination pictures equal to all the splendor and romance in the history of the world. Miami was pronounced in a variety of ways - as Miama, Myamee, and even MeeAmee. But no matter how the word was pronounced, people seemed to caress it on their tongue like a child licking a piece of candy. There was a period at the beginning of the Boom when I believe that Coral Gables was even better known than Miami - because of the advertising that Mr. Merrick did throughout the country. I remember when I first saw the drawings of the famous Spanish gates and the Douglas Entrance - done by artist Demman Fink - I thought they were the most magnificent creations in the world. Mr. Fink was a well known magazine illustrator and was the uncle of George Merrick. In later years he was professor of fine art at the University of Miami. While I was on my first job, in the advertising department of the old Miami Metropolis, in 1923, we used to get letters from people asking where Miami was in relation to Coral Gables. Although Coral Gables was just emerging from the planning stage, people already thought of it as a great city - the most beautiful city in the world. But in spite of Mr. Merrick's multi-million-dollar advertising campaign, Miami held the center of the stage once the Boom got under way. It was from Miami that N. B. T. Roney carried on his widespread real estate operations, including in the building of the Roney Plaza, Miami Beach's first important ocean-front hotel. Carl Fisher had built his hotels, the Flamingo and the Nautilus, on the bay side. Mr. Roney said that Mr. Fisher's hotels lacked style, that they looked like barns. He would show Mr. Fisher how to build a hotel. So he built the Roney Plaza. Whatever it looks like, it certainly is not a barn. The wealthy Phipps Corp., a $400 million concern, bought the right of way for Biscayne Boulevard, which was extended from downtown to Miami Shores. In the meantime Frederick H. Rand Jr. was building NE Second Avenue. The Florida East Coast railway was unable to supply Miami with the building materials - the cement, lumber and hardware - it needed for its construction program. Freight trains were so long that the engines jerked out couplings. Biscayne Bay looked like a dead forest, so many schooners lay at anchor waiting to be unloaded. In San Francisco decaying hulks of old schooners were taken out of "Rotten Row," loaded with West Coast lumber and sailed to Miami. Because the ships were too old to go round stormy Cape Horn they were towed through the Panama Canal. The value of Miami construction topped $60 million in 1925 while construction in Coral Gables passed $25 million. Miami Beach accounted for another $17 million. Because of the housing shortage, a luxury schooner, the Prins Valdemar, was brought into Miami Harbor for the purpose of converting it into a floating hotel. It was anchored on the edge of the new government channel, near where Chalk's Flying Service is located at Watson Island. One night the Prins Valdemar swung around on its anchor and sank across the channel, blocking the Miami Harbor and creating the greatest shipping distress in the area's history. Ships could neither get in nor get out. Loaded schooners had to stand off the roadstead of Government Cut and unload their lumber in lighters. Miami made another appeal to Mr. Warfield to bring his Seaboard Air Line on to Miami. Mr. Warfield announced a $25 million bond issue to extend the line from West Palm Beach, and, as would be expected, the bonds were sold immediately. Meanwhile, the F. E. C., hoping to increase its efficiency, borrowed specialists from the Pennsylvania Railroad. After a month they were ready to return home. They said they had learned more about how to run a railroad in Florida than they had ever learned in Pennsylvania. I worked so hard that I had to take a vacation in late 1925. My wife and I - and our infant daughter, Janice, - went up to Turnbull Hammock at New Smyrna. It was the farthest I had ever been away from home. But there was no way to get away from the Boom. Every acre of the hammock had been sold for citrus grove; but by this time people knew that more money could be made from selling residential lots than acreage, so everything was being cut up into subdivisions. About this time I read an article in a national magazine which described the sidewalks that had been built throughout the Florida countryside. "The only thing that will use these walks will be the ghosts of the Florida Boom," the magazine said; I laughed. With all the activities in Florida, with most of the money in the world, with all the people pouring into the state, how could such a prophecy come true? But it did. Additional Comments: Extracted from: "Memories of Old Miami" by Hoyt Frazure as told to Nixon Smiley Reprinted from a series of articles first appearing in Sunday Magazine of The Miami Herald Undated, but circa 1965 File at: http://files.usgwarchives.net/fl/dade/history/1965/memories/boomcome45nms.txt This file has been created by a form at http://www.genrecords.net/flfiles/ File size: 12.2 Kb