A Florida State of Mind by James D. Wright

Author:James D. Wright
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

SOUTH FLORIDA: THE NEW HAVANA

For thousands of years prior to the arrival of the Europeans, southeast Florida was inhabited by various tribes of the Tequesta people. One of these tribes, the Mayaimi, eventually gave the city of Miami its name. Evidence of human habitation in the region goes back about ten thousand years. The Tequesta were strictly hunter-gatherers, in that no evidence of agriculture can be found in the region prior to the European incursion.

The Tequesta were responsible for building the so-called Miami Circle, one of the oldest indigenous archaeological sites in Florida. The Miami Circle is located in what is now downtown Miami and was discovered in 1998 during a mandated archaeological field survey of what was to be the site of a luxury condominium complex. What the survey unearthed were twenty-four holes cut into the underlying limestone that formed a perfect circle thirty-eight feet in diameter. Excavation also turned up a wealth of archaeological artifacts ranging from stone axes to human teeth to the charcoal remains of ancient campfires.

What purpose the Miami Circle served for the Tequesta remains a matter of controversy. One early suggestion was that the holes were intended to hold poles that in turn supported a cone-shaped building of some sort. To others, the twenty-four holes suggested some sort of horological (timekeeping) function. One archaeologist from the University of Florida suggested that the circle was just a sink for sewage from an adjacent sewage tank. Despite efforts to go ahead with the planned condo development, perhaps by relocating the Miami Circle to some other site, the state of Florida stepped up in 1999, purchased the land for $26.7 million, and converted the area to the Miami Circle at Brickell Point Site, which was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2002 (and then declared as National Historical Landmark in 2009).

The first known European landing in the area around Biscayne Bay was by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés in 1566, the same man who founded Saint Augustine. The first European settlement in the region was a Jesuit mission established in 1567 and abandoned in 1569. The first permanent Spanish settlement in what is now Miami was not founded until 1743, by which time most of the Tequesta had been killed off in internecine battles with other tribes or by European diseases such as smallpox.

By 1920, the Miami population had swollen to nearly thirty thousand people. In the early 1920s, Miami authorities allowed gambling and were notoriously lax about Prohibition, so northerners poured in by the thousands. According to one estimate, the Miami population doubled between 1920 and 1923. But then the bubble burst: transportation systems were not adequate to handle the increased flow of people and goods, land was scarce and increasingly expensive, unemployment was on the increase, the cost of living was soaring, and the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 practically finished the city off. The Great Hurricane was followed by the Great Depression, and the future of South Florida looked grim.

Miami Beach had

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