Greater Miami’s Five Terrible Events Of 1926

By Seth H. Bramson

While the year 1896 was truly the crucible year for the then becoming-a-city-that-year community, one that was so tiny that, prior to Henry Flagler’s commitment to extend the railroad to the shores of Biscayne Bay and to build one of his great hotels (which would be named the Royal Palm) on the north bank of the Miami River, many, if not most, American maps did not even show a place named Miami on them. In no few articles it was also conveyed that there were several other years of great and major importance to the life and growth of the area, but, unquestionably, the bellwether year for all of Greater Miami was 1926, for it would be in that year, as I explain to my Florida history students at both Barry and Nova Southeastern Universities, that the five terrible events that would test the mettle of the Gold Coast, particularly Dade County, which was then in the midst of the greatest boom ever seen or recorded in Florida (as well as most of the country) up until that time.

1926 began with great hopes and expectations—there was no reason for feelings to be any different!—that the year would be nothing but a continuation of the incredible “boom” that had blessed South Florida and its business community since shortly after World War I, as thousands upon thousands of new residents poured in and innumerable businesses were opened. At the same time, new hotels, one more grandiose (for the time) than the last, opened on the then-brand new Biscayne Boulevard in downtown Miami as well as on Collins and Washington Avenues and Ocean Drive on Miami Beach. As had been advertised by the Florida East Coast Railway since as early as 1909, Miami (and its environs) was truly “The Magic City.”

The first of the five terrible events of 1926 began early in January of that year when the huge four-masted Danish schooner, the 241-foot Prinz Valdemar, up until that time the largest vessel ever to enter Miami’s harbor (which was hard by Biscayne Boulevard, extending from just north of where the new Bayfront Park had been built, beginning at Fifth Street and running to Northeast Thirteenth Street, with the FEC serving Piers 4 and 5 and the Miami Municipal Railway, built to connect to the just having come into Miami Seaboard Air Line Railway, serving Piers 1, 2 and 3, the numbers beginning at the north end of the port) was, according to several sources, on its way to becoming a floating hotel. Others have claimed and stated that the vessel was departing in order to continue operating as a freighter, but, regardless of which supposition was correct, the ship, on January 10th, capsized and sank at the mouth of the turning basin at the entrance to the harbor. (Eventually, after being righted, the Prinz would be positioned at the southeast corner of the docks, adjacent to the Boulevard, where it would become Miami’s aquarium, long before even as much as a thought of a Seaquarium would enter the minds of the folks at Wometco.)

The sinking of the Prinz Valdemar sent ripples of concern through the area’s commercial interests as the having come into Miami in late 1925 Seaboard Railway was, at the time, so far west of town, that it was carrying an absolute minimal amount of freight. The Florida East Coast, already overburdened and in the process of completing the double tracking of its line from Jacksonville to Miami, was completely overwhelmed, and within just a few weeks of the Valdemar disaster, with every siding completely filled between Jacksonville and Key West, and without room for a single freight car anywhere on the railroad (the only way that a freight car could come in was if an empty one was moved out), the FEC had no choice but to embargo itself: no freight would be carried south of Jacksonville except for food and medicine without a letter of authorization from the railroad’s vice president and general manager, Harry N. Rodenbaugh.

But as bad as those two events were, the next three, culminating with the September 17th and 18th 1926 hurricane, would be the harbinger of the great Depression that would begin in the rest of the country in 1929 and would put Miami—and south Florida—into a business decline that would last until the mid-1930s.

As was noted in our last column, 1926, which business and commercial interests would legitimately assume would simply be a continuation of the several great “boom” years preceding it, were distressed when the four-masted Danish sailing freighter Prinz Valdemar capsized in the turning basin at the mouth of the Miami harbor on January 10, 1926, leaving the region bereft of shipping alternatives to the Florida East Coast Railway. (While the Seaboard Railway had been extended to Miami late the previous year, it was so far west—at least at that time—and there were so few businesses which were located “out there” that it was, basically, meaningless in bringing freight in and out of Miami.)

Although the F E C was being double-tracked between Jacksonville and Miami, the then-existing infrastructure (sidings, team tracks, yards) was simply overwhelmed by the sudden and massive demands placed upon it to handle the huge amounts of building material and other goods needed for a city in the midst of a great economic boom. Because of that, the FEC was forced to embargo itself which left the railroad in a position of being unable to accept any freight shipments of any kind except for those of food and drugs unless the shipments of other materials were accompanied by a letter permitting their movement signed by the FEC’s Vice President and General Manager, H. N. Rodenbaugh. Simply put, there was no space for a single incoming freight car between Jacksonville and Miami unless a freight car was emptied and moved out: every siding, every team track and every yard track was filled.

It might be of interest to our readers to learn that, following the City of Miami Beach’s moving to the new city hall on 17th Street in 1978, it was, in 1980, my good fortune to be the person given the permission to “clean out” the old city hall on Washington Avenue. It was in going through the numerous files that I turned up a letter from Miami Beach’s first (and longest-lasting—1925—1958) city manager, the great Claude Renshaw, pleading with Mr. Rodenbaugh to allow a carload of material needed to extend the city’s “whiteway” system to be approved for shipment so that the city could continue its expansion of the street lighting project in place at the time.

That embargo, the second of “the five terrible events of 1926” would have its own far-reaching effects, for as word began to permeate throughout the nation via the press, and news of the embargo began to filter into and through the consciousness of thousands of home and lot buyers and the almost equally large number of prospective business owners (particularly in the area east of the Mississippi River), the perception of the Greater Miami area (including Miami Beach, Coral Gables, Sunny Isles, North Miami Beach and the other, various boom-time developments) as a place of unlimited opportunity, fantastic growth, endless potential and enormous profit-making possibilities began to fade.

The less than positive commentary would make its way to the various business news sections of newspapers and into national magazines, including The American Weekly, Collier’s, Saturday Evening Post, Time and others. That third terrible event would, unhappily, be no more than a prelude to the fourth as household after household would decide to simply stop (in their minds) “throwing good money after bad” and would simply allow the properties that they had bought (usually with $10.00 down and a payment of $10.00 per month) from George Merrick, Harvey Baker Graves, Carl Fisher, Ellen Spears Harris and Hugh Anderson, Arthur Griffing and others selling land in the various developments to go into default. And once the decision was made by thousands of would-be owners to cease making monthly payments, the various boom-time magnates became more and more hard-pressed to make good on their statements of services and promises of a golden future.

One of the least fortunate of the developers was Merle Tebbetts, he the founder of the Florida Cities Finance Company, which purchased the acreage of Lafe Allen, who had purchased the property from Captain William Fulford and began the development of what eventually would become North Miami Beach. Tebbetts poured money into Fulford-by-the-Sea, and, like Merrick in Coral Gables, Griffing in Biscayne Park, Spears Harris and Anderson in the Shoreland Company (Miami Shores), Harvey Baker Graves in Sunny Isles and almost all the rest of them, was riding the crest of the great boom until, following the first four events noted above, “the bottom dropped out.”

Tebbetts, unable to make good on many of the promises he had made while developing Fulford-by-the-Sea was arrested on federal mail fraud charges and put in jail. In bankruptcy, the development simply faded away and would only be resurrected years later after Lafe Allen (for whom North Miami Beach’s public library is named) took back the property, paid the taxes on it, and, basically, saved NMB.

The four events discussed thus far, terrible as they were, would pale in comparison to the horror of the decade, the September 17th and 18th 1926 hurricane, which we will present to you in all its terror, leaving you most likely aghast when you learn the truth and the facts (no “anecdotal evidence!”) about that horrific storm.

Just by surviving those first four events, which occurred in and during Miami’s thirtieth year as a city, Homestead’s 13th, and Miami Beach’s eleventh year as an incorporated municipality (Miami Beach was incorporated as a town in 1915 and became a city in 1917)—the region proved its mettle and was prepared thereafter for anything and everything that fate and the four winds could throw at it. But that, dear readers, did not make the recovery any easier.

As we have noted, the four events leading up to the catastrophic final and most horrendously disastrous event—the terrible hurricane of September 17th and 18th–were the capsizing of the Danish sailing schooner, Prinz Valdemar (at the time the largest vessel ever to enter Miami’s port) at the entrance to the turning basin of the Miami harbor in January; the embargoing of itself by the Florida East Coast Railway; the subsequent negative nationwide publicity, and the default and abandonment of their land, buildings and property purchased by literally thousands of buyers throughout the country. Miami and Miami Beach might—and probably could have and would—have recovered from all of those setbacks had it not been for the fifth and final of the five terrible events which, in sum, proved to be the harbinger of the Great Depression that would envelop the country three years later.

Although there were muted warnings several days ahead of the storm that “a hurricane is coming” few people knew what the significance of the warnings was, and as the radio broadcasts and newspapers (there were four daily papers in Miami at the time) did not seem to be expressing a great deal of concern (unlike today’s hysterical, shrieking, hyper-ventilating talking weather-heads, or, as the late, great NEILGOD would refer to them, “the weather fairies”) the warnings, which seemed mostly to be coming from ships at sea that had encountered the storm, were taken far too lightly. That lack of concern, that complete misunderstanding of, and disregard for, the power of the storm, would bring a hideously high death toll and immense property damage to all of Greater Miami.

The storm would roar out of the Atlantic on the evening of September 17th and would, for hour after terrible hour, blast away at Miami Beach, Miami, Coral Gables, Fulford-by-the-Sea (where it destroyed the Fisher-Fulford Speedway, the famous all –wood, steeply banked, used for only one race automobile race track at approximately today’s Northeast 18th and 19th Avenues and 188th—189th Streets, the site of the track now under the water of Sky Lake), the Shoreland Company’s properties (today’s Miami Shores) as well as a good bit more of then-Dade County as well as much of eastern Broward County.

L. F. Reardon, a noted journalist of the time, would go on to write, illustrate and publish a hard cover book detailing the horrors of the storm. His own home, although not completely destroyed by the storm, was severely damaged. Reardon’s book, one of several composed following that terrible natural disaster, vividly describes not only what he went through but what the area was like—the sheer, utter devastation—following the storm.

“Bringing it all down to brass tacks?” Beyond awful: More than 600 people killed, hundreds of buildings destroyed, Coast Guard cutters and other large ships thrown up on land, sand piled to the third floor of the then-brand new Roney Plaza Hotel at 23rd Street and Collins Avenue, the Flagler System’s Royal Palm Hotel on the banks of the Miami River so badly damaged that it would, except for about thirty days in the 1928 season, close for good following the storm.

Even Hurricane Andrew, with all its horrors, was equaled or outdone by the vicious and never-to-be-forgotten Miami hurricane of September 17th and 18th, 1926.

From a personal point-of-view, I think that what, today, distresses me the most is when the usual gaggle of front-running-phonies and know-nothings tell us to “just wait! We’re gonna get ‘the big one!’” as they chortle almost gleefully. Of course, for those damn fools who are totally bereft or any knowledge of our area’s history, and who, like those who are still trying to get listeners to believe in “the orange blossom myth” or that “that was Al Capone’s hideaway,” nonsense, even though he didn’t have any “hideaways,” (he had a house on Palm Island, Miami Beach) they neither know about nor care about what our history is, what is entailed in recording and researching it, and how we have suffered through, on so many different occasions, the so-called “big one.”

It is at that point that I turn with a cynical look and say, “you really don’t know what the hell you are talking about, do you?” following which I am generally met with a blank or befuddled stare. And it is generally, at that point, that I inform them as to what the truth is and what the facts are regarding Greater Miami’s real and true “big one.”

Perhaps, gentlemen and ladies, we will look into not only “the big oneS” but, and also, how many times we have been brutalized by them. Not pretty, but let’s straighten out said front-running phonies who are, generally, always wrong and never in doubt. We will be back with you soon, and until then, y’all take care now, heah?!!

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