The story of our region is filled with the achievements of enterprising dreamers from all walks of life.
One was the dream of famed architect Addison Mizner, who had made his mark with fabulous Palm Beach mansions. His dream was to build a city of a majesty that America had never seen before. Mizner envisioned it “as a combination of Paris, the City of Light, Rome, City of Eternity and something more, inexpressible, still undefined.” Smack on the South Florida coast.
There would be Venetian-style canals, fountains, gardens and lush, tree-lined avenues. He would design every single home, from luxurious estates to houses in neighborhood lanes. His buildings were to feature elements from his Palm Beach masterworks: turrets, minarets, domes and bell towers. A newly dredged lake would accommodate the largest yachts in the world.
This was the vision for an underdeveloped piece of land facing the white sands and the Atlantic Ocean. This was the vision for Boca Raton.
However, in a bit of history most citizens of Fort Lauderdale are unaware of, we too had a dreamer of a similarly fabulous vision. It’s a story we shared a decade ago, but it’s well worth revisiting.
Spawned by British royalty, this city was also planned to be built on a plot of undeveloped coastal property near what would later become Oakland Park.
The vision, as displayed in a pamphlet from that time, included villa sketches for members of the British royal society as well as expected visitors from Europe. They featured “a charming villa” for the king of Greece.
The visionary was the Countess of Lauderdale, whose late husband descended from the same line of Scottish aristocrats as our own Major William Lauderdale.
The countess’s dream was “to build the most beautiful city in the world.” It was underpinned by “masterminds of finance” as well as “the best of every profession necessary in building a great city of wealth, beauty and charm.”
Her name for it was Floranada—a blend of Florida with the queen’s realm to the north. Her inspiration came after spending a season in Palm Beach in 1908. However, she chose a wide-open area closer to the city that shares her name.
The headlines of the Miami Herald from December 18, 1925, read, “DREAM CITY IN OFFING: Visions of Countess of Lauderdale To Come True With Building of Floranada.”
So began the American-British Improvement Corporation and its plan for Floranada.
Many lots were sold here and abroad, ranging from $4,500 up to $8,000. Buyers, including many from New York and Philadelphia society as well as British aristocrats, dove in.
The yet-to-be-built town was incorporated as Floranada in 1926. The original residents of the area were surely mystified. When one of that area’s first settlers, a bean farmer named Thomas Whidby, arrived in 1901, there was a population of four: his wife, a man living in a driftwood house and a black man known only as Poole. By the time a landowner named Arthur T. Galt began buying up land 20 years later, the area was still mainly farmland, with the addition of a Methodist church and an elementary school.
And that’s how it would remain, the blueprints of geniuses and masters in all fields notwithstanding.
Like the Jimi Hendrix song about “castles made of sand” falling into the sea, the dream would suddenly end, with two cruel strokes, one an act of God, and the other, money.
In 1926, one of our worst hurricanes wiped out much of the property and businesses in and around Fort Lauderdale. The real estate boom went bust, banks failed and people lost their shirts.
But those twin strokes of fate affected not only Floranada. The Mizner vision of Boca Raton also came to a precipitous end—the spectacular Boca Raton Hotel and Resort was as far as he got.
And in our city, the only public reminder is the name of an elementary school in Oakland Park. Although an ornate public administration building was fully constructed, featuring imported Italian marble floors and huge mahogany doors (and an afterlife as a tavern) it was demolished in 1963.
Who knows—if things had played out differently, the Countess may have called on Addison Mizner to build a magnificent estate or two down here.
