FLORIDA: Pleasure Dome

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Fisher met him. He bought a house, prepared to settle down for a long rest. But he was still a young man, and he still had some restless money. On the sandy spit across the Bay from little Miami, a dreamy but energetic New Jersey Quaker named John Stiles Collins had planted coconuts (which died) and avocados (which throve). Thinking to sell some homesites on the spit, he started a wooden bridge over the bay, ran out of money in mid-water. John Collins' lawyer was young Frank B. Shutts from Indiana, who was also publishing the new Miami Herald. To Hoosier Fisher went Hoosier Shutts, for $40.000 to finish Quaker Collins' bridge. Carl Fisher put up the money, in return exacted 200 acres of Collins' swampland (after prolonged squawks from John Collins). That was the birth of Miami Beach.

Fisher's dredges sucked up the bay bottom, sloughed new land onto the spindly spit. Fisher's elephants (for publicity) trampled down the mangrove thickets. Around the Founder gathered a notable corps: onetime Boatbuilder John Levi, now a constructor, engineer, hard-headed "No man" to Fisher, privately wondering what all the splurging would come to; John Collins, helping Fisher's dream to fruition and himself to fortune; Collins' New Jersey neighbor, friend and son-in-law, Thomas Jessup Pancoast; James Allison, one of Carl Fisher's Indiana partners (for whom a famous military airplane motor is named) ; Publicityman Steve Hannagan (from 1924 on), who made himself and the Beach famous with bathing-beauty photographs, now entrusts the Beach and the technique to Deputy Joe Copps; and (by no means least) Negro Galloway, who had repented of his desertion, had become the personal factotum, confidant, worshipper of Carl Fisher (and now John Levi's white-coated, white-polled house servant).

Founder Fisher made the Beach, made them all. He almost went broke in 1922, recovered; he survived the hurricane of 1926, the Florida Boom and its collapse. He lost his millions not on the Beach but on his extravagant development at Montauk Point on New York's Long Island. When he died last July, "he hardly had one yacht to rub against another." This spring, from Woodlawn cemetery in Miami, his body is to be moved to the only grave permitted on Miami Beach.