Themes in American History

During the 1920’s, urbanization took place on a wider front than even before. While, New York was famous as the most commercial and creative city in the world, Florida was enjoying rapid economic growth, and Miami was becoming known as a tropical paradise, stirring the interests of investors from across America. It was the time of wild real estate speculation known as Real Estate Boom of the 1920’s. During this time, the stock market was moving forward at an extremely fast pace and many investors were becoming quite wealthy. As the boom gained speed, residential and commercial lots were sold and resold several times during a day, and prices spiraled. Celebrities and tourists flocked to the area, land sales increased astronomically and as a result land prices went up. Miami prospered during the 1920’s with the increase of population and infrastructure, but weakened after the real estate crash and the Great Depression.

Sources: Chudacoff 177; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_land_boom_of_the_1920s ; http://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/crises/forgotten.html

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The twentieth century brought about great changes for America, especially in New York.  New York had shown great progression economically, culturally, and architecturally. There was growth in every aspect of New York life from informal to professional subjects. However, there were also changes taking place in other parts of America and not all of those changes ended as good as New York. One of those places are Miami, Florida. In the mid 1920s, Florida was facing a land boom. Miami was looked at as a tropical paradise and people from all over America decided to invest in land. There was easy credit access and the prices of the land were quickly increasing. This led to the brokers and dealers ordering large amounts of supplies and causing a big problem with the railroads, some of them even being stranded en route. In result, there was a negative news feed about investing in Florida real estate.

Although the railroads were messed up, there was still ways of transporting goods by waterway. That was used until 1926, when a ship sank at the base of the port, making impossible to reach by any other ships, killing every way of transporting goods at the time from January until May. But by that time, Miami was no longer a place people wanted to go. Later that year, Miami faced a huge hurricane and left most developers bankrupt. After facing another big hurricane two years later then the stock market crash in 1929, Florida was no longer looking like the paradise it had initially been. The great depression and the invasion of mediterranean fruit flies left Florida with a bad economy that wasnt fixed until after World War II. Although New York faced economic depression as well, nothing was as bad as having your resources cut off and actually ruining your land.

[caption id=”attachment_2086″ align=”alignnone” width=”600″ caption=”photo from "Miami: Then

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