Pleasure Dome

(See Cover)

"There are no boll weevils in the tourist crop," the sages say in Florida. Last week Florida was harvesting its biggest crop of tourists. In limousines and trailers, by airline and boat and railway (at lowest fares ever), they spread through all the long reach from Jacksonville on the north to Key West in the south (see map). They went to fish for sail, marlin, tarpon on both coasts; to peer at fish on display at Marineland and Silver Springs; to watch their favorite ballplayers at Orlando, Clearwater, Sarasota; to hear the Bok Carillon at Lake Wales; to see Seminoles and alligators and flamingos and orange trees; to have fun.

They settled at St. Petersburg (up 15% over 1938-39); at snooty Palm Beach and plebeian West Palm Beach (up 20%); at Fort Lauderdale, "fastest growing city in the fastest growing county in Florida," (up 20%); at Daytona Beach, Key West, St. Augustine, Tampa (up 20%). And by uncounted thousands they were diffused in trailer camps, autocamps, hamlets, roadside inns. By April 1, when the winter season wanes and the smaller summer crop begins to bud. the calculators figure that upwards of 3,000,000 will have come and departed, left $365,000,000 in Florida pockets.*

The place to see the tourist crop at its verdant best and worst was along a patch of the Atlantic coastline, 350 miles down from the Georgia border, 145 miles up from the southernmost Florida Key. There lies the "Miami area."

Seen from the air, this go-square mi. patch looks like one sprawling bailiwick, set in the flat expanses of citrus groves, bean and pepper and tomato fields that extend southward to the swampy Everglades. Actually it is divided into three parts. There are 1) the residential suburbs: Hialeah, Coral Gables, Coconut Grove, South Miami (where many a homeowner last week had moved into his garage-apartment, rented his house for the winter season); 2) the city of Miami, lovely in segments but raw-ugly in sum, with its own tolerant government and its flamboyant, perennial "reform" Mayor E. G. Sewell; 3) Miami Beach, with its own City Council, its Mayor John Hale Levi. The city of Miami is a city, much like other booming U. S. towns; Miami Beach is a unique U. S. phenomenon.

In Mayor Sewell's thriving city of Miami last week:

> Slack-chinned, dull-eyed Crackers from the back country thronged the narrow streets, along with vacationers in shorts and halters, blue-red-yellow slacks, astrologers, hackies, pimps, and the solid, trading, homeliving folk of the city.

> The News (which at the height of the Florida Boom led all U. S. newspapers in advertising lineage) headlined G-Man John Edgar Hoover, ineffectively sounding off against the local toleration of gamblers, gangsters, brothels; and Governor Fred Cone in Tallahassee, effectively commanding Miami politicos to close down the gaming.

> At Hialeah, three dog-tracks and one jai-alai (Cuban handball) fronton in the Miami gambling area, betters on a single "poor Monday" last week wagered $800,000; since the winter season opened had poured in a record $25,000,000 (including the takes at both Hialeah and Tropical Park horsetracks).

> At wondrous Dinner Key, just south of the city, Pan American's great-winged Clippers cleared 2,509 passengers between the U. S., Cuba and the near Indies, the Southern Hemisphere (and men now dream of a great mart at Miami, for the goods and peoples of the western world).

> Rain fell one morning, and women wore light topcoats that night. Over was Florida's longest cold spell on record. How many sunbirds the freeze and its chill, cloudy aftermath had kept or driven away was unknown. Florida's winter adding machines are not geared to subtract.

One of Miami's claims to fame is that it is the city near Miami Beach.

Town in the Sky. There are two Miami Beaches. Both of them front, benefit, outdazzle Miami across blue Biscayne Bay. One is geographic; a long (10-mile), low spit between the Bay and the Atlantic. The other is the town of Miami Beach, which is like no other town in the U. S., or in the world:

> 1,600 acres of land which a scant 25 years ago was mangrove tangle, bare sand, avocado patches.

> 2,800 acres dredged from the bottom of Biscayne Bay, dumped onto the natural core and into 15 fabricated isles.

> Winding through and between the mother key and the islands, 20 miles of inland waterway, 35.2 miles of beach and bayfront; 110 miles of palm-lined street and lane.

It is Florida's booming, catholic pleasure dome, looming low and broad against the Atlantic sky. Coconut and royal palms, hibiscus, croton, flame vines, night-blooming jasmine shroud mile upon serpentine mile of streets and lanes and waterways. On Lincoln Road, where the mangrove and sand once sold for 75-c- an acre, the play world shops at swank branches of De Pinna's, Hattie Carnegie's, Saks-Fifth Avenue, and property is quoted at $1,000 a front-foot. The creamy, orange, blue and yellow palaces, villas, cottages are of concrete blocks beneath their stucco (to guard against "the next hurricane"). Their open patios, loggias, halls and broad window spaces are designed for life and ease in the sun; on their roofs, the sun is put to work, heating water in glassed reflectors. Northward by the Atlantic is the Surf Club, where the cabanas trace an S along the beach, and a Philadelphia socialite named Alfred Ilko Barton teaches the rich how to be lavish. By the County Causeway over the Bay, and in the Flamingo Hotel's blue basin, are the yachts and cruisers: Nakhoda, Pleiades, Marmot, Virago (lately chartered by J. P. Morgan), many another. Just beyond the city line of Miami Beach (where gambling is taboo), in separately incorporated Surfside, is the Brook Club, where gambling is an elegant business. At the extreme, northerly end of the spit is a subdivision called Golden Beach where Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt last week rented the Ross W. Hudsons' house for occupancy April 18.

Along with the socialites (the William Kissam Vanderbilts arrived last week), there are many, many more of unspectacular fortune (oil, hats, machinery, Coca-Cola, motors, patent medicine) whose yachts and homes adorn the Beach. There is "the mob" from Hollywood and Broadway (Al Jolson, Walter Winchell, Ben Bernie, et ol., usually at the garish, $8-$75 a day Roney Plaza); or a few, like Columnist-Author Damon Runyon, in their own winter villas; and some, like the Manhattan George ("Romeo & Juliet") Lowthers (TIME, Nov. 27), who last week were swapping their tabloid fame for a free honeymoon at the Floridan Hotel.

Hundreds are well-to-do rather than rich, spending a month's income for two weeks, a month, a winter by the sea. (More of these than of any other group buy $25-$50,000 houses, retire the year round to Miami Beach.)

Swarming thousands of thrifty folk stretch a year's savings over two weeks in "South Beach," where there are many small, relatively cheap ($5~$1) hotels, the dog-track, drug-store lunch counters, the only public beach space. Collectively they bring millions in cash to Miami Beach. Their tide is spreading northward to and past 15th Street, where (at Alton Road) an apartment-hotel sign is a symbolic outpost. The sign: GENTILES.

Son of the Beach. Near Miami, 64 years ago, when the county had less than 800 residents, lived a Republican notary called the Duke of Dade. He was able, it is said, to conjure up 350 Republican votes for Hayes, tip the Florida electoral balance against Tilden, and thus assist in robbing the Democrats of the 1876 Presidential election. Since then the political morals of Miami and environs have not materially improved. But Mayor John Hale Levi of Miami Beach would never be so crass as to manufacture votes, and nobody ever called him the Duke of anything. Presiding last week at a meeting of the Miami Beach City Council, His Honor wore a brown jacket, linen pants neatly molded to his modest paunch, tan-and-white sneakers which could have passed for bedroom slippers. Cocked off centre in his tanned, round, somewhat sallow face was one of Shorty's High Grade Stogies (made in Gallipolis, Ohio), which the Mayor continually chews or smokes.

John Levi speaks of "the Beach" as fondly as he would of a child (he has none: handsome Mrs. Levi has a son by a previous marriage). He is 64; she is perhaps ten years younger. The Levis, like many another moderately well-to-do couple whose spacious, substantial but unobtrusive homes dot the less effulgent sections of Miami Beach, are never seen at the Surf, Bath or Brook'(gambling) Club. They eschew such roisterous joints as Mother Kelly's night club. "My position, you know," the Mayor explains with distinct regret. Mrs. Levi spends much time at bridge, fishing, or at Hialeah on racing afternoons. The Mayor is likely to be at home, ensconced on his front porch with a rye-and-plain-water. Next to judicious sipping, his joy is Skippy, gifted Boston bulldog, who can seize a fallen coconut, whirl it round & round on the palm-fringed lawn until he has stripped off the fibrous covering. Of this performance, Levi & Skippy never tire.

Mayor Levi pronounces his name lee-vie, is distressed when he hears it called lee-vee, regards his ancestry as Anglo-Saxon. He is friendlier to the Jewish influx than was Founder Fisher, whose companies' hotels still bar Jews.

John Levi actually looks as if his name should be Paddy O'Rourke. He also looks and lives like what he is: a well-off, semi-retired businessman who has softened with the easy years. But in his town's peculiar politics, he is as hard as a stonecrab.

A communal autocracy is his Miami Beach. Shy, able, $10,000-a-year City Manager Clyde Renshaw tends to the mechanics of city government. John Levi and a close little sodality of realty operators, builders, bankers, other local businessmen tend to politics. They comprise, employ, or otherwise control most-of the voting population (4,043 in 1932; 8,552 in 1939). And they perforce are tolerant realists, balancing and catering to the wants of the 200,000 winterbirds who flit in and away, the small but growing number who choose to dwell in Miami Beach.

Brothels are taboo in Miami Beach because 1) they are bad for the home trade, and 2) there are plenty just across the bay in Miami. Gambling flourished until 1936. Then Levi & Co. concluded that gambling racketeers were also bad for business, banged down the lid on everything except one legalized dog-track (which pays the city $50 a day during the season).

Unlike some who helped to build "the Beach," John Levi has not lost his sense of proportion. Says he: "They say Carl Fisher was the father of the beach, and that I am the son of the beach."

Journey to the Sun. Miami Beach is "the Beach" because a man named Carl Graham Fisher had imagination and $5,000,000. Carl Fisher was an Indiana Hoosier, and he was a humdinger. He made his first fortune in PrestOLite acetylene lamps for automobiles, sold out just as electric headlights were coming in. That was 1911, Carl Fisher was 37, and he was honing to play with his money. So he had the Seabury Shipyards in New York City build him a motor yacht, invited Seabury's Superintendent John H. Levi to go on the first cruise--down the Mississippi, through the Gulf and around Florida's tip. Also along were the first Mrs. Fisher (she got a Paris divorce in 1926), one Harry Bushman, and a Negro cook named William Galloway.

Christmas week in New Orleans, Friends Fisher & Levi got tight on Ramos gin fizzes (a drink that was new to them), pelted a policeman with a toy elephant, placated Mrs. Fisher with an armful of knickknacks. On the Gulf, after a day and a half of freezing storm, Pilot Levi headed for Mobile Bay, beached the boat. Cook Galloway leaped ashore. "I'm never going back on that boat again," he announced, and trudged off toward Mobile. Next day the Fishers and Bushman headed back for

Indianapolis, leaving John Levi to ship the boat from Mobile to Jacksonville. He cruised it around Florida, discovered that a metal lever had deflected his compass, got sadly lost. But eventually he found his way through the Florida Keys (with a native fisherman's help), moored in Biscayne Bay in January, 1912. One long look at those blue waters and the hamlet on the shore was enough for him. He wired Carl Fisher: "Meet me in Miami ... a pretty little town."

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.

*All totals are guesstimates; Florida does not know its tourist arithmetic. But specific indices, airline travel, hotel rentals, garbage collections show the seasonal total up 25-30%.

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