page_title: History of Miami
section_title: 1900s to 1930s: The Magic City
hierarchical_section_title: History of Miami / Twentieth century / 1900s to 1930s: The Magic City
caption_attribution_description: English: Digital photo taken by Marc Averette. The Dade County Courthouse at 73 East en:Flagler Street in en:downtown Miami 3/5/2007.
context_page_description: Thousands of years before Europeans arrived, a large portion of south east Florida, including the area where Miami, Florida exists today, was inhabited by Tequestas. The Tequesta Native American tribe, at the time of first European contact, occupied an area along the southeastern Atlantic coast of Florida. They had infrequent contact with Europeans and had largely migrated by the middle of the 18th century. Miami is named after the Mayaimi, a Native American tribe that lived around Lake Okeechobee until the 17th or 18th century.
  In 1566, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés was sent by the Spanish monarchy to remove the French from Florida who had already established several colonies. Although Menéndez left behind two Jesuit missionaries in an attempt to convert the Tequesta to Roman Catholicism, the tribe were indifferent to their teachings. The Jesuits returned to St. Augustine after a year. Fort Dallas was built in 1836 and functioned as a military base during the Second Seminole War.
  The Miami area was better known as "Biscayne Bay Country" in the early years of its growth. The few published accounts from that period describe the area as a wilderness that held much promise.
context_section_description: Miami experienced a very rapid growth up to World War II. In 1900, 1,681 people lived in Miami, Florida; in 1910, there were 5,471 people; and in 1920, there were 29,549 people. As thousands of people moved to the area in the early 20th century, the need for more land quickly became apparent. Until then, the Florida Everglades only extended to three miles (5 km) west of Biscayne Bay. Beginning in 1906, canals were made to remove some of the water from those lands. Miami Beach was developed in 1913 when a two-mile (3 km) wooden bridge built by John Collins was completed. During the early 1920s, the authorities of Miami allowed gambling and were very lax in regulating prohibition, so thousands of people migrated from the northern United States to the Miami region. This caused the Florida land boom of the 1920s, when many high-rise buildings were built. Some early developments were razed after their initial construction to make way for larger buildings. The population of Miami doubled from 1920 to 1923. The nearby areas of Lemon City, Coconut Grove, and Allapattah were annexed in the fall of 1925, creating the Greater Miami area.
  However, this boom began to falter due to building construction delays and overload on the transport system caused by an excess of bulky building materials. On January 10, 1926 the Prinz Valdemar, an old Danish warship on its way to becoming a floating hotel, ran aground and blocked Miami Harbor for nearly a month. Already overloaded, the three major railway companies soon declared an embargo on all incoming goods except food. The cost of living had skyrocketed and finding an affordable place to live was nearly impossible. This economic bubble was already collapsing when the catastrophic Great Miami Hurricane in 1926 swept through, ending whatever was left of the boom. The Category 4 storm was the 12th most costly and 12th most deadly to strike the United States during the 20th century. According to the Red Cross, there were 373 fatalities, but other estimates vary, due to the large number of people listed as "missing". Between 25,000 and 50,000 people were left homeless in the Miami area. The Great Depression followed, causing more than sixteen thousand people in Miami to become unemployed. As a result, a Civilian Conservation Corps camp was opened in the area.
  During the mid-1930s, the Art Deco district of Miami Beach was developed. Also during this time, on February 15, 1933, an assassination attempt was made on President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt. While Roosevelt was giving a speech in Miami's Bayfront Park, Giuseppe Zangara, an Italian anarchist, opened fire. Mayor Anton Cermak of Chicago, who was shaking hands with Roosevelt, was shot and died two weeks later. Four other people were wounded, but President-elect Roosevelt was not harmed. Zangara was quickly tried for Cermak's murder and was executed by the electric chair on March 20, 1933 in Raiford, Florida.
  Also in 1933, the Miami City Commission asked the Miami Women's Club to create a city flag design. The flag was designed by Charles L. Gmeinder on their behalf, and adopted by City Commission in November 1933. It is unknown why the orange and green colors were selected for the flag. One theory is that the colors were inspired by the orange tree, although the University of Miami was already using the colors of orange and green for their sports teams since 1926.
  In 1937 the local Ku Klux Klan raided La Paloma, an LGBT nightclub. After the non-lethal raid the nightclub became a site of a more solidified LGBT community and resistance against conservative sexual laws.
caption: Dade County Courthouse, built in 1928, is the tallest building built in the 1920s.
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