America’s homespun philosopher Will Rogers put it in a nutshell when speaking of a Florida land speculator he knew: “[He] discovered that sand could hold up a real estate sign.”
Rogers might as well have added that Everglades muck could hold up a real estate sign too. We’re referring, of course, to the greatest land swindle in Fort Lauderdale history.
Early 20th-century auctions here sold parcels to Northerners who read fabulous promotions of the “New Fertile Crescent” made possible by the dredging of the Everglades. Buyers bought tracts from the 500,000 acres Richard Bolles was hawking. Bolles, a New Yorker who had made a fortune in Colorado gold mines, paid the State of Florida just 2 bucks an acre – for land pretty much underwater. He sold parcels for $240.
As historians tell us, he was not alone in selling dreams of glorious South Florida land that later turned into nightmares.
Famed architect Addison Mizner – who had attained international stature with luxurious estates in New York and Palm Beach – turned his eyes to a patch of palmetto and scrub grass just north of us.
Brimming with concepts inspired by Spanish and Mediterranean palaces, Mizner, with his brother Wilson as grand promoter, sold well-off investors on what was to be the world’s first planned city, Boca Raton. As Caroline Seebohm wrote in Boca Rococco, the architect envisioned it “as a combination of Paris, the City of Light” and “Rome, City of Eternity.”
Mizner would design every home, from the plush estates to homes in neighborhood lanes. Indeed, he platted out the entire city: A newly dredged lake would accommodate the largest yachts in the world. His own home would be modeled after a 14th-century Spanish castle, complete with a drawbridge.
Then, to our south, developers like Walter Fuller, George Merrick and Carl Fisher were at work peddling Miami land. Their sales often went to “earnest dreamers who thought they were buying a retirement haven on a beach but ended up with a patch of fetid swamp,” according to author Christopher Knowlton in Bubble in the Sun.
To gauge how crazy those times were, Knowlton cites real estate ads. One day’s Miami Daily News had a whopping 504 pages, swollen with the ads.
By 1925, by one count as many as 7,000 people seeking land entered our state each day. In Massachusetts alone, owners of more than 100,000 bank accounts used their savings to invest in Florida land. Ohio leaders were so stunned by cash flowing here that they banned Florida real estate firms from doing business in Ohio.
In Fort Lauderdale, Bolles’ auction in March 1911 drew upwards of 3,000 buyers arriving by train. Some were paid as stand-ins to buy land sight unseen. The onslaught dwarfed the number of residents in our town, which numbered a paltry 143 in the previous year’s census. Our inns and boarding houses quickly filled to the seams, and most travelers were housed in tents set up by organizers.
The amount of land Bolles had to hawk was staggering – 500,000 acres equals almost 30 Westons.
Of course, as history tells us, boom eventually came to bust all over as people up North realized what suckers they were, as did the newspapers – which had previously helped hawk the dream. The Washington Times called our city’s fraud “one of the biggest land swindles in history.”
Not long after, Mizner’s investors in the dream city of Boca Raton began pulling out. While there’s no evidence the architect had any malice aforethought, he and his brother could not pull off their grand and costly scheme. News of fraud elsewhere in South Florida dimmed enthusiasm, but perhaps more importantly, railroads, faced with a glut of orders for building supplies from all over South Florida, could not deliver. For a time, freight was limited to foodstuffs, so great was the backup.
As for Miami, the bust was much the same. As Walter Fuller wrote in his memoir, “We just ran out of suckers.” The suckers ended up with worthless land and worthless paper.
In the end, the bust boomeranged to the top. Bolles was put on trial for fraud. Addison Mizner, although he left us his Palm Beach-style imprint and one scaled-back resort from his dream, the Boca Hotel, was broke by 1930.
According to Bubble in the Sun, when George Merrick of Coral Gables died at 55, he left an estate of $400. Not many years later, Carl Fisher was found loitering on a park bench in Miami Beach. “I’m a beggar — dead broke,” he said.
