1928 Miami Miramar Hotel Bookmark Highway Map of Florida

This c. 1928 bookmark issued by the Miami Miramar Hotel incorporating a strip map of eastern Florida. From the heyday of the Florida Land Boom, it highlights U.S. Highway 1 and the Tamiami Trail linking Miami with Tampa.

A Closer Look

The map displays a portion of Florida's east coast between Jacksonville and Miami, dominated by U.S. Highway 1. Other connecting highways are also noted, including U.S.-94, the Tamiami Trail (discussed below). The locations of the Miramar Hotel in Miami and the Melbourne Hotel in Melbourne (presumably with the same owners) are marked prominently. A table of distances at bottom includes miles between Jacksonville, Melbourne, and Miami.

The verso includes a depiction of the seaside Miramar hotel and lauds its accommodations. The hotel's December-April season reflects its appeal to winter-weary northerners. Located on Biscayne Bay near today's Margaret Pace Park and the Venetian Causeway, the hotel opened around 1925 and closed in the early 1970s, with the building being demolished afterward.

The Tamiami Trail

Throughout the 1920s, Florida went on a road-building spree, with the Tamiami Trail (U.S. Highway 94 here, later U.S.-41), linking Tampa with Miami via Fort Myers and Naples, proving to be the most challenging in financial and engineering terms. Construction began in 1815 on a short section of Dade County, but money and enthusiasm quickly dried up. In 1922 the entrepreneur Barron Collier began to champion the project, helping to fund it if Florida would name a county after him. At this point, two competing routes in southwest Florida were under construction, one through the new Collier County - the route as conceived initially - and one through Monroe County, which was nearly completed despite being an alternative to the original plan (this became the 'South Loop' of the trail). In either case, the most challenging part of the highway's construction across the Florida Everglades was completed in 1928, with considerable additional funding (including from Collier) and a tremendous amount of dynamite (2.6 million sticks). Even today, the highway is a long trek with one lane in each direction through mostly uninhabited, protected state and federal land. In the 1960s, 'Alligator Alley' (state Route 84, later incorporated into Interstate 75) opened to the north of the Tamiami Trail with two lanes in each direction.

Boom Times in South Florida

In the late 19th and early 20th century, Florida experienced a series of land booms and crashes; the most well-known of these occurred in the 1920s. The collapse of a previous land boom that established Florida as a center for the citrus industry in the 1880s - 1890s allowed for the easy acquisition of large tracts of land at cut-rate prices. Industrialist and founder of Standard Oil Henry Flagler (1830 - 1913) seized the opportunity to build his Florida East Coast Railway and extend it to the region that would develop into Miami and other communities on the state's southeastern coast.

Flagler and other boosters of the region successfully promoted it as a paradisical escape from the grimy cities and cold weather of New England and the Mid-Atlantic. Land prices shot up at an astronomical rate, and developers carved new instant-towns out of the wetlands. In addition to Flagler's railway, the arrival of the highway system and associated businesses (gas stations, motels, restaurants, etc.) in the 1920s made the region more easily accessible. Nonetheless, speculation around Florida land had reached irrational heights, and the damage caused by two hurricanes, followed by the financial crash of 1929, led to a collapse in the real estate market, ruining many investors.

Publication History and Census

This map was drawn by 'AMI' for the Miami Miramar Hotel. It is undated, but the inclusion of U.S. Route 94, the Tamiami Trail, signifies 1928 or later. We are unaware of any examples of this work in institutional collections.