Miami, Florida

“ Miami, Florida, is one of the oldest ex-slave women in Miami. Like most ex-slaves she is very courteous; she will talk about the "old times", if she has once gained confidence in you, but her answers will be so laconic that two or three visits are necessary in order for an interviewer to gain tangible information without appearing too proddish.
With short, measured step, bent form, unsteady head, wearing a beaming smile, Salena takes the floor.
"Ole Dr. Jameson, he wuz my Massy. He had a plantation three mile from Perry, Georgia. I can 'member whole lots about working for them. ”

“ One can never tell what is going to turn up in Florida waters. The prospectuses of{197} both winter and summer resorts usually lay it on a little too thick. The Miami prospectuses always sound very much too much. Starting with the bathing-girls on the front cover and ending with the proud fisherman on the back cover, they always look a little too perfect. ”

“ In 1910, Miami had a population of 5,471. In 1920 there were about 30,000 people living there. In 1922 there were 40,000. That’s the way things go in Florida. Once let a thing get a foothold, and it grows so rapidly that the general effect is more that of an explosion than a growth.{138}
Grass grows with such enthusiasm in Miami that one can’t merely plant seed and let it grow. If one did that the grass would come in so thick that it would choke itself. What one does is to plant the seed and then, when the seed has sprouted, transplant the spears of grass so that they’re six inches apart. ”

“ Guideposts for Florida begin to appear, and heavy touring cars roll past on the way to Miami and Palm Beach. There are some charming wooden churches—the Negro ones being poorer, looking better sacrifices unto God than those of the Whites. ”

“ There is not a horse in the settlement, and only one mule, whose duty is to haul a light summer car between the houses. The vehicles of Palm Beach are said to be confined to 380 "bicycles, wheel-chairs and jinrickshas." Off to the westward the distant horizon is bounded by the mysterious region of the everglades. Far down the coast the railway terminates at Miami, the southernmost railway station in the United States, a little town on Miami River, where it enters the broad expanse of Biscayne Bay, which is separated from the Atlantic by the first of the long chain of Florida keys. ”

“ The face of the country is exceedingly rocky, rocky beyond anything that you will imagine, but the climate is pleasant and healthy, and the mosquitoes not at all troublesome during the winter months. The Miami and the country adjacent upon the bay is similar in all respects to the Perrine claim, probably not quite so rocky, but my favorite place upon the bay is the ADDISON place upon the Perrine grant. ”

“ After looking over the ground, and getting the opinion of a heap of people who ought to have an intelligent opinion covering the facts known and suspected, I’ve come to the conclusion that if ever there was a time when you could play safe by suspecting everybody you met of having some sort of money interest in this big game, it’s down along the Florida west coast and like as not over toward Miami just the same. ”

“ Rival champions of the east and the west coasts of Florida may fortify themselves by a study of the tables. It may be noted that Miami and Tampa have the same midday temperature, but that Tampa has a greater range, the night temperature on the average falling five degrees lower than Miami ”

“ It is earnestly to be hoped, for the sake of invalids, that accommodations along the shore at Key Biscayne, and at the mouth of the Miami, will before long be provided. While it is the very best, it could also be made the most accessible part of the sea coast of Florida, as the whole journey from the North could be made by water. Game as deer, bear, turkeys, etc., etc., very abundant in the pine woods, which extend along the coast, and fish swarm in countless numbers in the bay. Turtle of the finest kinds can be caught on the islets off the shore. Oysters are plentiful. ”

“ The bootleggers are very active in Miami; and the Miami bootlegger is a very superior{187} sort of bootlegger. He comes around to his patrons each day with long lists of wet goods and the prices, and gives the names of prominent bankers as references for his reliability. The prices seem pleasingly low to northerners who have been paying one hundred and twenty dollars a case for stuff that is only fit for cleaning the nicotine out of pipe stems. The bootleggers get their wares in Bimini, which is a small island only a few miles off the Florida coast. ”

“ In the big hotels in Palm Beach, Miami, Ormond, Daytona, St. Augustine and other Florida resorts are the time-killers, with their jewel-lariats and their acres of white trousers: with their flask-trimmed tea-dances and their hard-boiled social aspirations and their refined gambling houses, and their trick whisky-canes. The sun, to the time-killers, is not of the utmost importance. If they were unable to change their clothes several times a day they would feel ill-at-ease ”

“ More than one hundred lives were lost in Miami and property damage reached one hundred million dollars. In 1928, another big hurricane started in the vicinity of the Cape Verdes, swept across the Atlantic, and devastated Puerto Rico and parts of southern Florida. Loss of life was placed at three hundred in Puerto Rico and at two thousand in Florida, mostly in the vicinity of Lake Okeechobee. ”

“ Positive limitations are the general beginning and ending positions of each route together with important locations and municipalities within the limits described. COUNTIES IN WHICH LOCATED 1 182 - 140 - 178 - 177 - 176 - 196 - 224 - 332 - 162 - 559 - 252 - 21 - 468 - 273 From the intersection of 13th St. and SR 5 in Miami East along 13th St. and across 13th St. Causeway to Miami Beach, then Northerly along the Ocean Route via Surfside and Hallandale to a point on SR 5 in Dania. From the intersection of East Las Olas Blvd. and SR 5 in Ft. Lauderdale East along East Las Olas Blvd. ”

“ If you are not too far away can't you manage to come to dinner with us to-night? We are here at Miami in the yacht and I'll see to it that you get enough to eat. I suppose you haven't any dinner coat, but never mind that; come just as you are.
Alison. P. S. Why haven't you written me in a whole half year?
If the sluggish drainage canal we were cutting through the black, peaty soil had suddenly changed its course to ooze the wrong way I could scarcely have been more astonished. In the first place I hadn't the slightest idea that Alison was in Florida or within a thousand miles of it ”

“ A People Peculiar. Twenty years or more ago, riding through the flat, palmetto-fringed pine woods of east Florida, before Standard Oil Flagler built his coast railroad to Miami, sundry lean, swarthy, active people of both sexes, were frequently to be met with, more especially in and about St. ”

“ Miami is home to people whose families have been in our country for generations -- and to people who have only just arrived. This diversity is one of the great strengths of that city -- and it is one of the great strengths of our country. ”

“ I have been looking the sun straight in the eye for 5 months with result that my own eyes pain me constantly and I am always behind blue glasses and canvas patches. It is all a bit tedious and makes home look a good ways off. Miami, like all the towns we have visited, seems to be in the midst of a real estate boom. The sun pours down and is beaten back into your face and eyes from new cement sidewalks and buildings. ”

“ The Fountain of Youth, sought for in vain by Ponce de Leon three hundred and seventy years ago, is in Florida. Time has not dried up the source of its health-giving, its life-giving, waters. They flow as of yore, and every one who thirsteth can partake of them freely. Invalids and pleasure-seekers find it in our glorious climate, in our invigorating breezes, which blow as soft and balmy as those from Ceylon’s isle; in our beautiful flowers and almost perpetual verdure, and in the total absence of the chilling winds and frosts of the North and West, which render life almost unendurable. ”

“ In time, coral sand-spit and mangrove swamp were cleared for a wonderland playground, of divine climate whither winter tourists throng by the hundred thousand. In time, too, these sand-spits and swamps and older formations of the sunny peninsula furnished homes and sources of livelihood or of wealth to many thousands more, people, these, to whom Florida is a Career, not a Resort. ”

“ Even Palm Beach has nothing unusual to show until the holidays of mid-winter bring its vast hostelries back to life. One loses little in fleeing all day onward at Southern express speed.
Miami, however, is worth a halt, if only for a glimpse of the United States in full tropical setting. There the refugee from winter will find cocoanuts nodding everywhere above him; there he may pick his morning grape-fruit at the door; and he need be no plutocrat to have his table graced with those aristocratic fruits of the tropics, the papaya and the alligator-pear. ”

“ The Miami itself, with its precipitous bank of two hundred feet, defends the western side. The ravines are occupied by small streams. Quite around this peninsula, on the very verge of the ravines, has been raised an embankment of unusual height and perfection. Meandering around the spurs, and re-entering to pass the heads of the gullies, it is so winding in its course that it required one hundred and ninety-six stations to complete its survey. ”

“ Nearly every afternoon they sat by a small table under an orange tree, or beside the blue water, or on a city sidewalk, and had nice things to eat and drink.
The people were always kind to them and the sky was nearly always sunny. It is a land of sunshine and flowers and fruit, like our own sunny Florida, though Italy is much more beautiful. It is hardly twice the size of Florida, but nearly one-third as many people live there as live in the whole of our great United States. It is a crowded, happy, lovely country, and Molly and May will never forget their wonderful journey through it. ”

“ In 1513 Juan Ponce de Leon (c. 1460–1521) , who had been with Christopher Columbus on his second voyage and had later been governor of Porto Rico, obtained a royal grant authorizing him to discover and settle “Bimini,”—a fabulous island believed to contain a marvellous fountain or spring whose waters would restore to old men their youth or at least had wonderful curative powers. Soon after Easter Day he came in sight of the coast of Florida, probably near the mouth of the St Johns river. ”

“ Favored indeed is Florida, not only in climate, scenery, and fruit, but with the munificence of these mighty-hearted millionaires, who have Alladin-like metamorphosed the sunny peninsula into a veritable fairyland. I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. H. B. Plant, who has transmogrified Tampa, and ribboned Florida with his railroad system. As usual with men of great minds and means, he is wholly unpretentious, as much so as his humblest employee. ”

“ The difference was doubtless that of the crowded air and encumbered ground in the great Northern city—in the fact that the demonstration is made in Florida as in a vast clean void expressly prepared for it. It has nothing either in nature or in man to reckon with—it carries everything before it; meaning, when I say “it,” in this momentarily indefinite way, the perfect, the exquisite adjustability of the “national” life to the sublime hotel-spirit. The whole appearance operates as by an economy so thorough that no element of either party to the arrangement is discoverably sacrificed ”

“ Miami is the centre of a farming country in which citrus fruits, especially grape-fruit, pineapples and winter vegetables are raised for northern markets. There is excellent rod-fishing; Spanish and king mackerel and blue-fish are shipped from Miami in large quantities; and in Biscayne Bay there are important sponge fisheries. An alligator “farm” and the Subtropical Laboratory of the U.S. government are points of interest. ”

“ Once Cuba, regarded as the shore of India, had been the center of the West, and Florida no more than a chimera: how ironic such errors and reversals were! Now it was Juana that was legendary, and Florida resembled the significant hooked finger of an imponderable power. The day slid rapidly into water that had lost its blueness for expanses of chalky shallow green, and the flat roofs of Key West and masoned arches became slowly visible across the sea, and a stir of departure filled the decks. ”

“ I am his lover.
[Still looking after Rolfe.
Miami. [Stamps with anger.] Hear me! In what do the red yield to the white men? and who among the red men is like Miami? While I was yet a child, did the dart which my breath blew through my sarbacan ever fail to pierce the eye of the bird? What youth dared, like Miami, to leap from the precipice, and drag the struggling bear from the foaming torrent? Is there a hunter—is there a warrior—skilful and brave as Miami? Come to my cabin, and see the scalps and the skins that adorn it. ”

“ The river Perdido being its western, and the Apalachicola its eastern limit.
The capital of East Florida is St. Augustin; that of West Florida, Pensacola.
During the struggle of Great Britain with her American colonies in 1781; Spain took forcible possession of Florida, and it was confirmed to that crown by the treaty of peace in 1783.
The climate of the Floridas, is for the most part tolerably good; in the summer it is very hot; the winters cold, and the rivers are frequently frozen during that season. Inland, and on the mountains, the air is very pure and salubrious. ”