Miami: history and heritage

About Miami: history and heritage

By the ULTIMATE Miami Editorial Team

Editor-in-Chief: Jai Michael

Miami is young for a great city, incorporated only in 1896, and it has changed faster than almost any other. A frontier on Biscayne Bay became a railroad resort, a boom town, a city of Art Deco hotels and then, after the Cuban Revolution of 1959, a bilingual capital whose language, food, music and business look south to the Caribbean and Latin America.

At a glance

Population: 442,241 in the City of Miami and 2,701,767 in Miami-Dade County (US Census Bureau, 2020 Census).

Peoples: about seven in ten residents of Miami-Dade are Hispanic or Latino, and Cuban Americans are the largest group, roughly a third of the county’s people; Haitian, Venezuelan, Colombian, Nicaraguan and many other communities add to the mix (US Census Bureau, American Community Survey).

Incorporated in 1896, transformed after 1959: few great cities have changed so fast.

Names: Mayaimi, the name of a people and a lake, gave the river and the city their name.

Shaped by: the Tequesta, Spanish Florida, the Seminole, the Florida East Coast Railway, the land boom of the 1920s and the Cuban exile after 1959.

The Tequesta

The Tequesta lived around Biscayne Bay for some two thousand years, fishing its waters and building villages at the mouth of the Miami River. The Miami Circle, a ring of holes cut into the limestone on the river’s south bank, is one of their most remarkable sites. Juan Ponce de León sailed this coast in 1513; by the eighteenth century the Tequesta had been destroyed by disease and slave raids. In the nineteenth century the Seminole, who still live in the Everglades, resisted removal through three wars.

The Magic City

In the 1890s a local landowner and businesswoman, Julia Tuttle, persuaded the railroad builder Henry Flagler to extend his Florida East Coast Railway to Biscayne Bay. The railway arrived in April 1896, and on 28 July 1896 the city was incorporated: Miami is often described as the only major American city founded by a woman. It grew so fast it was nicknamed the Magic City.

Boom, bust and Deco

The land boom of the 1920s created Coral Gables, with its Mediterranean Revival villas and the Venetian Pool, and Miami Beach. A hurricane in 1926 ended the boom, but in the 1930s South Beach filled with small Art Deco hotels in pastel stucco, and after the war MiMo, Miami Modern, brought the swooping hotels of the jet age. The Miami Design Preservation League saved the Art Deco district from demolition in the 1970s, and it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.

The Cuban city

After the Cuban Revolution of 1959, hundreds of thousands of Cubans came to Miami: in the first wave of exiles, on the Freedom Flights of 1965–1973 and in the Mariel boatlift of 1980. The Freedom Tower downtown, where many were received, is known as the Ellis Island of the South. Little Havana, with Calle Ocho, Máximo Gómez Park’s domino players and the cafecito windows, is the heart of Cuban Miami, and Spanish is heard everywhere.

Gateway to the Americas

Haitians made Little Haiti; Nicaraguans, Venezuelans, Colombians and Argentines followed; and Miami became the business, banking, music and media capital of Latin America in the United States. Art Basel Miami Beach, held each December since 2002, the Pérez Art Museum and Wynwood’s murals made it an art capital too.

Our advice: start with a cafecito on Calle Ocho and watch the domino players at Máximo Gómez Park, visit the Freedom Tower, then walk Ocean Drive in the evening, when the Art Deco hotels light up in neon.

Sources

Population: US Census Bureau, 2020 Census and American Community Survey. History: HistoryMiami Museum; National Park Service (Miami Circle; Art Deco historic district); Miami Design Preservation League; Miami Dade College (Freedom Tower).

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