Word: beaching
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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They settled at St. Petersburg (up 15% over 1938-39); at snooty Palm Beach and plebeian West Palm Beach (up 20%); at Fort Lauderdale, "fastest growing city in the fastest growing county in Florida," (up 20%); at Daytona Beach, Key West, St. Augustine, Tampa (up 20%). And by uncounted thousands they were diffused in trailer camps, autocamps, hamlets, roadside inns. By April 1, when the winter season wanes and the smaller summer crop begins to bud. the calculators figure that upwards of 3,000,000 will have come and departed, left $365,000,000 in Florida pockets...
...Miami (where many a homeowner last week had moved into his garage-apartment, rented his house for the winter season); 2) the city of Miami, lovely in segments but raw-ugly in sum, with its own tolerant government and its flamboyant, perennial "reform" Mayor E. G. Sewell; 3) Miami Beach, with its own City Council, its Mayor John Hale Levi. The city of Miami is a city, much like other booming U. S. towns; Miami Beach is a unique U. S. phenomenon...
...communal autocracy is his Miami Beach. Shy, able, $10,000-a-year City Manager Clyde Renshaw tends to the mechanics of city government. John Levi and a close little sodality of realty operators, builders, bankers, other local businessmen tend to politics. They comprise, employ, or otherwise control most-of the voting population (4,043 in 1932; 8,552 in 1939). And they perforce are tolerant realists, balancing and catering to the wants of the 200,000 winterbirds who flit in and away, the small but growing number who choose to dwell in Miami Beach...
Brothels are taboo in Miami Beach because 1) they are bad for the home trade, and 2) there are plenty just across the bay in Miami. Gambling flourished until 1936. Then Levi & Co. concluded that gambling racketeers were also bad for business, banged down the lid on everything except one legalized dog-track (which pays the city $50 a day during the season...
Unlike some who helped to build "the Beach," John Levi has not lost his sense of proportion. Says he: "They say Carl Fisher was the father of the beach, and that I am the son of the beach...