a very SPECIAL MOMENT in TIME, Issue 2, September 2014

HOW AND WHY DID CARL FISHER WIND UP IN MIAMI BEACH?

By Seth H. Bramson, Miami Beach Historian

To celebrate Miami Beach’s centennial (March 26, 2015) the City of Miami Beach will publish a monthly monograph of Miami Beach history through February of 2016. Issues will focus on chronology, events, places and people. Through the complete series, the reader, the historian, and those interested in Miami Beach in general will enjoy a look back at the history of the city that, for its size, has had more words and stories written about it than probably any other city on Earth.

Carl Fisher, "Mr. Miami Beach"

There is no question that Carl Graham Fisher was, is and will always be known as “Mr. Miami Beach.” It was Fisher who, along with his partner, Jim Allison, would, after giving Messrs. John S. Collins and his son-in-law Thomas Pancoast the $50,000 they needed to finish the first bridge connecting Ocean Beach to the mainland, received title to the latter’s 222 acres of land. Purchasing an additional 56 acres Fisher and Allison then owned 278 acres of what, in the not-too-distant future, would become Miami Beach.

All well and good, but how did Carl come to Miami Beach? The story is an incredible and serendipitous mix of confluence and coincidence, and without each element falling into place, none of it would have happened.

Carl Fisher and Jim Allison had built “the Brickyard,” also known as the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Along with their inventions and marketing skills, they patented a switch to be placed on the new-fangled horseless carriage’s dashboard by which headlights could be turned on. A breakthrough at the level of automobile air conditioning and cruise control, the switch replaced the headlamps that had to be manually lit each time the vehicle’s owner wished to go out at night, there being, at that time, no streetlights! Union Carbide saw the potential for the invention and in 1911 handed Carl and Jim checks for $5,633,000 each!

Shortly before, Collins and Pancoast’s bridge construction company had run out of money, and they returned to New Jersey (most of Miami Beach’s earliest founders were Jerseyites) casting about for an investor. Running into an old friend, John H. Levi, a yacht broker and marine engineer from New Jersey who represented Seabury Shipyards in New York City and who oversaw the building of Fisher’s yacht, which Levi accepted delivery of in Cairo, Illinois, they explained their plight to him and asked him to let them know if he ever ran into anybody willing to invest in the bridge venture.

There have been several stories relating to Carl Fisher’s (January 12, 1874 —July 15, 1939) involvement with Collins and Pancoast. With slight variations, however, each of them, whether in  Jerry Fisher’s “The Pacesetter,” (Jerry is a distant relative), Jane Fisher’s “Fabulous Hoosier” (Jane was Carl’s ex-wife), J. N. Lummus’s “The Miracle of Miami Beach” or Charles Edgar Nash’s “The Magic of Miami Beach” seems to coincide with the brokering of a yacht for Fisher by Levi.

Fisher planned to take the boat for a leisurely cruise down the Mississippi, into the Gulf of Mexico, around the Florida Keys and up the east coast of Florida.  After several difficulties during the shakedown voyage, Fisher elected to debark from the cruise at Mobile, leaving the yacht with Levi for shipment by rail to Jacksonville. Railroad bridge clearance problems precluded the large ship from being sent that way so Fisher, en route back to Indianapolis, instructed Levi to complete the trip by water, taking the boat to Jacksonville. As fate would have it, that would not happen!

Levi, upon reaching Miami, was so enthralled with the then-small town that he elected to stay, wiring Fisher to join him in what was already being called “The Magic City” rather than in Jacksonville.

Stories have been told to the effect that Fisher met Collins and Pancoast through Levi in New Jersey, but those stories have been shown to be incorrect: Fisher met Collins either in Miami or on Ocean Beach early in 1912 and learned about the stalled bridge project at that time. He told his wife, Jane, “that little Quaker (Collins) is the bravest man I have ever met. Imagine, Jane! He is starting a gigantic project like that bridge at the age of 75-- when most men are ready to sit down and die!” As she recounts in her book, Jane knew then that Carl, the brains behind Prest-o-Lite and the builder, with Mr. Allison of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, had found a new challenge.

This was Carl Fisher’s second Miami Beach home, or Shadows II as he referred to it, 

located between 50^th and 51^st streets  on the west side of North Bay Road. Although the interior 

was substantially re-done the exterior remains. This house replaced his first 

Miami Beach home, the Shadows, located at the foot of 

Lincoln Road, east of Collins Avenue, directly overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.

Once again, there are slight variations in the story of how Fisher obtained the land that would, in 1915, become Miami Beach, but, essentially, the facts are that Carl agreed to loan Collins $50,000 to complete the bridge and in return Collins gave Fisher 222 acres of beach land one mile long and 1,800 feet wide from the ocean to the bay. Fisher then purchased an additional 56 acres on Ocean Beach. The incredible story of Carl Fisher has been told in three books dedicated to him, in each of the Miami Beach histories (accurate or otherwise) written through the years, and in numerous articles, hence it is not necessary to provide yet another lengthy discussion of his life here. 

Fisher would, as the world knows and as his memorial at 51^st Street and Alton Road on Miami Beach states, “… create a great city from a jungle” before he lost interest in the city he envisioned and built. Retaining a home in Miami Beach, he moved on to his fateful and destined to fail project of building a northern clone of Miami Beach at Montauk Point on the eastern end of Long Island. Falling victim to alcoholism and becoming ever more reclusive, Fisher died of a gastric hemorrhage in St. Francis Hospital on Allison Island late in the afternoon of July 15, 1939. 

Near bankruptcy, having sold and mortgaged almost all he owned in Miami Beach to build Montauk, he was only 65 ½, ten years younger than John Stiles Collins was when Fisher first met him. Without going into paroxysms of glorification, it is safe to say, when talking about Carl Graham Fisher, that not only is the city of Miami Beach his monument but that he was and always will be the greatest single name in the history of the city. Carl Fisher was and is and will always and forever be the one and only (no matter what anybody else, living or dead wants to claim or call themselves) “Mr. Miami Beach.”

Reader’s comments are always welcome and should be addressed to Professor Seth H. Bramson, Office of the City Manager, City Hall, 1700 Convention Center Drive, Miami Beach, FL  33139.