Coral Gables, whose 100th anniversary as a city we celebrate this week, was a carefully designed community that was never supposed to be a city at all – founder George Merrick had always pledged that Coral Gables would be part of the City of Miami. But it was not to be.
Instead, in April of 1925, Mr. Merrick’s branded “Master Suburb” was incorporated as the fifth city in Miami-Dade County, converting the vision into what became “The City Beautiful.”
Miami, the county’s first city, was incorporated on July 28, 1896, but with only 400 people it made no waves outside this area, nor did Homestead in 1913 or Florida City in 1914. Master showman Carl Fisher’s Miami Beach drew more headlines as it grew after its 1915 founding than it did at the time.
Coral Gables was different. It was publicized nationally. Homesite buyers flocked to its doors in Mr. Merrick’s fleet of 100 long-distance pink buses years before it became a city, as Miami Today’s Coral Gables Centennial supplement this week makes clear.
But that early development of Coral Gables came when Mr. Merrick was its sole owner and could independently shape its future. In March of 1925, however, the Coral Gables Corporation was formed with the power to sell shares.
As the late historian Arva Moore Parks noted in her biography of Mr. Merrick, he had bought added property to create what he then called “Coral Gables: Miami Riviera” and then realized that he needed more money to complete his $100 million plan. That development money would come from buyers of shares in the new corporation in what would soon be a new city.
Unknown behind-the-scenes machinations spurred lightning action.
On April 27, 1925, a 50-page charter bill that was not previously announced won unanimous Florida Senate consent. A half hour later the House concurred. The governor signed it into law two days later and Coral Gables was a city. Its five commissioners were all officials of the Coral Gables Corporation – conflicts of interest are nothing new in Miami-Dade County.
Unfortunately, the new city would be battered by forces more extensive than the overreach of the founder to build far more than he could finance or the market would absorb.
By the end of 1925 the Florida land sale mania was slowing as buyers who had been flipping deeds immediately for fast profits started to run out of people to flip them to. Then, in September 1926, a great hurricane wiped out buildings and fortunes. The nail in the coffin was the stock market crash of 1929, ending the Roaring Twenties and initiating the Great Depression. Mr. Merrick died nearly broke in 1942.
Despite these massive setbacks, Coral Gables retains much of its early design, planning and tone. Moreover, it retains a commendable pride in heritage and in building upon that heritage rather than discarding it, as happens in much of the county. In tear-it-down Miami, for example, residents care far less about that city’s early days than do the proud people of Coral Gables.
Each Miami-Dade municipality does have its own flavor, and while new cities won’t be created in two days as Coral Gables was in 1925, more may be on the drawing board. A county charter review to begin in June should examine whether to place every bit of the county in a city, as charter writers envisioned in the 1950s, and leave county hall to focus on big-picture challenges.
Over the past 100 years Miami-Dade added 30 cities, towns and villages after Coral Gables, most of them successful and unique. Next to mark a centennial will be Hialeah, founded Sept. 1, 1925, whose history and growth differ greatly from Coral Gables.
Next come three cities with 1926 centennials: North Miami, Opa-locka and Miami Springs. They will be followed by 16 more that will mark centennials before 1950, and nine thereafter.
If you look at before-1950 and after-1950 incorporations, you’ll see a span of 42 years when no city that now exists was formed in Miami-Dade. That’s only because one city disappeared.
At the end of 1960, 13 of the 18 registered voters in the northern 33 islands of the Florida Keys – the only part of the Keys within Miami-Dade County – voted to incorporate a municipality for those islands.
The aim was to join those islands via a highway connecting the southern end of Key Biscayne with the Overseas Highway on Key Largo and spur development on the islands to send land values through the roof, much as Mr. Merrick’s turning of citrus groves into a developed community sent Coral Gables land values soaring.
The county’s planning board unveiled the highway plan in 1950. But, as you may notice, Key Biscayne remains connected to Miami but not to Key Largo. A six-lane-wide swath of cleared land down the center of Elliott Key that was to become Elliott Key Boulevard has diminished to an 8-foot-wide nature trail.
After legal issues, the county in 2012 abolished the City of Islandia and the municipal count today is 34 cities, not 35.
Any future cities, however, are unlikely to be developer driven, as many of our present ones were, with Coral Gables spotlighted at age 100 this week. May they all be that successful a century later.
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