The Tribune

TOUGH CALL

By Larry Smith

THE connections between Florida and the Bahamas are more complex than some readers might imagine. In fact, Bahamians were among the first settlers of many South Florida communities – including Coconut Grove, Ft Lauderdale and Key West.

Growing up in Nassau in the 1960s, I clearly remember what an event it was to visit Miami and eat at the fabulous Burger King on Flagler Street. We stayed at cheap downtown hotels like the Patricia, the Alhambra or the Columbus, and shopped in mercantile palaces like Zayre, Walgreen’s or Woolworth’s.

I’m not sure what black Bahamians did in Florida during those days of cracker-barrel segregation. It was only in 1960 that sit-ins led by the Congress for Racial Equality made it possible for blacks to shop and eat in Burdines and other department stores.

And it was not until the following year that a “white” hotel (the Biscayne Terrace) accepted black guests for the first time.

Miami was always the Bahamian metropolis. But since the 1980s, many white Bahamians at least, have preferred Ft Lauderdale to the overcrowded and increasingly Hispanic conurbation further south. Since I attended the University of Miami in the early 1970s, the area’s growth has been explosive, but Miami is far more congested than the rest of South Florida.

Usually a Bahamian trip to Florida is planned for purely commercial reasons, with little time to stand and stare. But after settling our daughter into college last week, we decided to take a closer look at a community we really knew nothing about.

Ft Lauderdale is actually one of the oldest cities in South Florida.

The name comes from a US Army commander who built a small stockade on the north bank of the New River in 1838, during the Second Seminole War. According to a contemporary description of the site: “On the east lay the ocean...on the west...lay the Indian (New) River. Beyond the river an almost impenetrable jungle of tropical growth spread out.”

Before this, the New River site had been occupied by Bahamian homesteaders Charles and Frankee Lewis, who made a living from wrecking and fishing.

The original Tequesta Indian inhabitants had either left or died from disease during the 1700s, and the Seminoles did not move into the area until the early 1800s.

In 1824, the Lewis family received a 640-acre land grant straddling the New River where Federal Highway runs today.

Any visitor to Ft Lauderdale will know that very little remains of this early landscape. But just off Las Olas Boulevard downtown – right next to the Cheeesecake Factory – you can find a relic of the city’s beginnings. It is a frontier home called the Stranahan House that dates to 1901. And it was built on a site that had been used as an Indian trading post since 1894.

About ten acres of the Lewis land eventually ended up in the possession of a shopkeeper named Frank Stranahan. He built a small store that became a community centre, and was later expanded into a two-storey home after his marriage to schoolteacher Ivy Cromartie. Nestled in a bend in the river, Stranahan’s little store appropriated the name Fort Lauderdale, and this is where the city began.

Today, the historic Stranahan House stands on a small remnant of the riverfront property that descended from the original Bahamian grant.

Dwarfed by high rises, it is all but imperceptible to passers-by. And right next door is a vacant lot where a new condo tower will rise.

“We fought against it for 11 years but they finally got approval, even though most of the buildings around here are minimally occupied,” a

Stranahan House guide named John told me. “Of course, it’s in limbo now because of the recession.”

It is impossible to imagine Florida’s pioneer days simply by sitting on the Stranahan House verandah overlooking the murky and polluted New River. Nothing remains of the original landscape except the site itself – a tiny pocket of century-old trees within a vast wasteland of asphalt, concrete and glass.

But inside the house, Frank and Ivy’s lifestyle has been carefully restored for the enjoyment of the few thousand visitors who come here each year.

During a guided tour, visitors learn that when Frank married Ivy in 1900 there were only five white families, a couple dozen blacks (including some Bahamians) and a few hundred Indians living at the New River settlement.

Frank became something of a local tycoon before suffering a nervous breakdown and committing suicide in 1929 – drowning himself in the river just outside his home. Ivy went on to become a matriarch of the community. After she died in 1971 the house was acquired and renovated by the Fort Lauderdale Historical Society, and is now on the National Register of Historic Places.

If Stranahan’s trading post was the initial step in Ft Lauderdale’s development, the deciding factor was the arrival of Henry Flagler’s

Florida East Coast Railroad in 1896. Flagler had made his fortune in a new industry called oil refining and then became interested in resort development, building a series of grand hotels in St Augustine, Palm Beach, Miami and Nassau.

Flagler created a shipping company and consolidated several short-line railways to provide transportation to his resorts. And he made the development of Miami possible by extending his railway through the Everglades – then considered a noxious swamp. In the process, he was responsible for laying out the town of Ft Lauderdale as a whistle stop along the way.

Today, more than half of the original 4,000 square miles of wetland and forest known as the Everglades has been destroyed by development and canalization. In fact, the entire area west of Florida’s Atlantic coast has become a gigantic strip mall punctuated by ubiquitous condo towers.

Ft Lauderdale is both a riverine and a coastal community, but most people would never know it most of the time. They really did pave paradise and put up a parking lot.

Riverwalk Park – a sort of fish fry for sophisticates completed in the 1990s – is an attempt to create a semblance of identity for the city that is sadly lacking. Although the development preserved the New River Inn, the area’s first hotel (built in 1905 and now a museum), it also involved the destruction of much of the city’s oldest surviving historic neighbourhood.

Riverwalk is meant to present Ft Lauderdale as a pedestrian-friendly, world-class city. But it remains a weak counterbalance to the ever-advancing strip mall culture – a culture that makes it much easier to cross the street in a car than on foot.

This is a form of economic growth that we in the Bahamas seem to be emulating, with no rhyme or reason. The message I took away from my visit to Ft Lauderdale is that we should take care to protect what is left of our historical and environmental heritage before it is swept away in the heat of urban development.

And don’t tell me that commercial development cannot be achieved without thoughtless destruction.

In 1904, Florida governor Napoleon Broward promised to drain “that abominable, pestilence-ridden swamp” known as the Everglades. And over much of the 20th century an alliance of business and government interests almost succeeded. Water resources dwindled, wildlife disappeared, soil dried up and blew away, forests were flattened, and invasive species proliferated.

Once known for its clear waters, lush seagrass beds, abundant fish and bird populations, the attacks on the Everglades caused the Florida Bay ecosystem to collapse in the 1980s.

The entire balance of nature was upset in just a few decades. And now the State and Federal governments are spending billions to restore the Everglades by re-establishing natural water flow and managing growth better, while Everglades National Park has become a major tourist attraction.

At some point we have to ask ourselves how many strip malls, parking lots and condo towers do we really need?

(This article was originally published in October, 2010).

• What do you think? Send comments to larry@tribunemedia.net or visit www.bahamapundit.com