Bubble in the Sun

November 11, 2019
Former Fortune writer Knowlton (Cattle Kingdom) charts the 1920s Florida real estate market’s plummet from boom to bust in this vivid narrative. Arguing that Florida’s 1927 real estate market collapse helped to cause the Great Depression, Knowlton describes the post-WWI transformation of South Florida as “dramatic” and “lunatic.” He profiles ambitious developers and architects including Carl Fisher, who turned his family’s grapefruit plantation into the planned community of Coral Gables, and Addison Mizner, who popularized the Spanish Colonial aesthetic, and documents the efforts of marketers and Wall Street investors to convince people to move to Florida. Knowlton credits writer and environmental philanthropist Marjory Stoneman Douglas for documenting the loss of bird populations and natural flood protection as stuccoed subdivisions were carved out of the Everglades swampland. Displaced black Floridians, he notes, were welcome in new mansions as servants but forced to live outside of all-white towns in inferior conditions. Overvaluation and a lack of oversight eventually caused a market crash that “spread like an infection,” Knowlton writes, drawing a comparison to Florida’s role in the 2008 financial crisis. Knowlton successfully captures the vibrancy and mixed legacy of Florida’s boom years and makes a convincing, if familiar, case for the state as an economic bellwether.

November 1, 2019
A well-told history of the 1920s Florida land rush, the developers who fueled it, and an environmentalist who saw its dangers. Writers like Erik Larson and Gary Krist have found a sturdy formula for enlivening history: Take a neglected or misunderstood era or incident, ferret out its colorful heroes and scoundrels, and show not just their successes or failures, but the social forces that shaped their lives. Former Fortune magazine London bureau chief Knowlton (Cattle Kingdom: The Hidden History of the Cowboy West, 2017, etc.) uses the method to fine effect in his story of a land-buying frenzy that led one observer to note, "All of America's gold rushes, all her oil booms, and all her free-land stampedes dwindled by comparison with the torrent of migration pouring into Florida." The author begins with Henry Flagler (1830-1913), the patriarch of Florida resort development, but moves on quickly to the architects and developers who drove the 1920s rush, including Addison Mizner in Palm Beach, George Merrick in Coral Gables, and David Paul "D.P." Davis in Tampa. Perhaps no man was more flamboyant or controversial than Carl Fisher, who dredged Biscayne Bay for the sand needed to build Miami Beach and whose razzle-dazzle publicity efforts fed the boom and its collapse, owing to factors that included rampant overleveraging and the hurricanes of 1926 and 1928. Fisher had a small elephant who caddied for visiting President Warren G. Harding and hired black laborers who couldn't live in his subdivisions: "The so-called Caucasian clause in the deeds prohibited anyone but a white person from buying a parcel of land on the island." The writer Marjory Stoneman Douglas saw the injustices to blacks and the environmental risks of overdevelopment and later wrote the nature classic The Everglades: The River of Grass (1947). In an especially strong chapter, Knowlton argues cogently that while the collapse of the bubble alone didn't cause the Great Depression, "the Sunshine State did provide both the dynamite and the detonator." A lucid account of the human and economic factors that drove a notorious land rush.

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November 1, 2019

In the early 20th century, south Florida saw one of the biggest building booms in American history. Lightly populated before the construction of late 19th-century railroads, Florida became the latest "last frontier" in America, with residents and investors pouring into the state. Knowlton (Cattle Kingdom) traces the history of the developers, architects, and publicists who helped build and promote cities including Miami Beach, Palm Beach, and Coral Gables. Colorful stories of outrageous ambition and excess are tempered by brief discussions of the environmental consequences of development, especially in the Everglades. The focus, however, remains primarily on the developers and their wealthy clients. The economic argument suggested by the subtitle is saved for the end, in which Knowlton draws a convincing comparison between 1920s Florida and the early 2000s surge in real estate speculation. VERDICT Recommended for readers interested in the history of Florida and those who enjoy stories of the rich and glamorous in the 1920s.--Nicholas Graham, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 15, 2019
Memories of the real-estate collapse of 2008 may stoke interest in Knowlton's (Cattle Kingdom, 2017) entertaining account of a similar boom-and-bust in 1920s Florida, during which Palm Beach, Boca Raton, Miami Beach, and Coral Gables were created. Knowlton profiles each location's primary investor and promoter, skillfully presenting their personalities as they amassed fortunes, only to end as paupers. Carl Fisher was an attention-seeking automotive baron who arrived in Florida in 1911, and bought most of an island he renamed Miami Beach. The same year, George Merrick arrived to run his family's grapefruit plantation; a decade later, he developed it into a planned city for the middle class, Coral Gables. The wealthy gravitated to Palm Beach, where in 1918 a bon vivant architect named Addison Mizner took residence and designed dozens of mansions. With these and other characters in place, including writer Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, Knowlton tracks a dizzying inflation of real-estate prices that peaked in 1925, followed by the bubble bursting a year or so later. Knowlton delivers a vibrant, eminently readable cautionary tale about business and cultural history.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)