The Tragic Story of the Man Who Built Miami Beach and Died Broke: Carl Fisher

Miami Beach did not exist until Carl Fisher dredged it out of a mangrove swamp. The man who built it died broke, within sight of the shore he invented. This is the full account of how a half-blind boy from Greensburg, Indiana turned a nine-million-dollar automobile-headlamp fortune into the most artificial coastline in America. Carl Fisher lent a broke seventy-five-year-old farmer, John Collins, roughly fifty thousand dollars to finish a wooden bridge across Biscayne Bay, took two hundred acres of oceanfront mangrove in trade, then dredged the bay bottom up into dry land and imported white sand to make a beach that had never existed. He sold the manufactured paradise to the nation with a baby elephant named Rosie and a president-elect on the golf links. Into the deeds of that same city he wrote who was forbidden to own it, barring Jews north of Fifth Street, while the Black laborers who cleared the mangrove and raised the beach were made to carry a police pass and leave the island after dark. At his peak Carl Fisher was worth, by most accounts, between fifty and one hundred million dollars. Then he leveraged the whole of Miami Beach to build a second resort city at Montauk, on the tip of Long Island, one year before the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 and the 1929 Crash erased the Florida land boom his fortune rode on. His Montauk project fell into receivership, and in 1939 Fisher died broke. Two years later the city set a block of granite in his honor that records the city he carved and nothing of the exclusion written beneath it. Copyright & Fair Use Notice This video is a non-commercial, educational history documentary produced for research and for purposes of commentary, critique, and analysis. Certain archival photographs and video clips appear here under the Fair Use doctrine (Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act), including use for commentary and criticism, news reporting, instruction, scholarship, and research.