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Coral Gables, Florida - On Tuesday, April 29, a new play will open at the Miracle Theater in Coral Gables as part of the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the city’s incorporation. The play will run through that following weekend. “Greetings from Paradise” is an original play written by local writer June Thomson Morris, a veteran media professional who grew up in Coral Gables. See: www.junemorris.com.

The Play

The play begins in a passenger train car heading south to Miami during 1925. The car carries Lucy, a young women from small-town Indiana who is coming down to marry her beloved, and Frank, another passenger and a journalist who has quit a Gotham newspaper and is free-lancing to report on this new frontier.

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Robert, Lucy’s beloved, meets them at the train station. He is also a transplanted Hoosier who has kept up an alluring correspondence with Lucy, enticing her to come down to his sunny paradise through colorfully illustrated postcards, hence the name of the play: “Greetings from Paradise.” He is also an attorney documenting the real estate investments being transacted.

Lucy insists on getting married straightaway, and Robert relents, so they head off to the court house for a conjugal transaction. There is no need to go away for a honeymoon when you are already in paradise!
Frank proceeds to visit Coral Gables in order to witness the real estate sales process being conducted by Doc Dammers, the city’s mayor and top salesman. There Frank also meets George Merrick, the developer of what they propose to make “America’s first perfect suburb.”

Robert and Lucy then visit the Flamingo Hotel on the Biscayne Bay side of Miami Beach. This hotel and much of that sandbar was developed by Carl Fisher, another Hoosier and the founder of the Indy 500 car race. Fisher was also a leading promoter of investing in Florida real estate.

Back in Coral Gables, Dammers hires Frank to write promotional materials for such investments. Merrick tells Frank: “What you’re selling here is not land,” but “romance…the tropics…[things] that don’t grow up north.” Frank, however, insists that we must respect “the natural ebb and flow of a mature marketplace.” When the inevitable economic downturn arrives and prices drop by over 50%, everyone is traumatized.

Nevertheless, Robert and Lucy’s marriage survives, and Merrick finishes building the Biltmore Hotel. The opening gala was a grand event, with champagne flowing despite Prohibition, new songs composed for a full orchestra, and Bobby Jones signing autographs on the golf course.

Then the hurricane of 1926 unleashes another wave of destruction. Frank gives up and goes back north, but Robert and Lucy stick it out and prosper. Their grand-daughter wrote this play!

Boom and Bust

The play is set starting in April 1925, a year when an estimated 2.5 million Americans moved to Florida. These were all lawful domestic immigrants from other states, drawn by the sunshine, real estate investment opportunities, and lower taxes. The year before the state legislature had abolished income and inheritance taxes.

Over-heated real estate speculation led to the downturn in prices, typical of the boom-and-bust cycles that have characterized Florida’s economy ever since. These cycles are cases of repeated irrational exuberance. The hurricane of September 1926, which was particularly destructive in South Florida, completed the cycle of destruction during those two years. Nevertheless, George Merrick completed building the Biltmore Hotel even as the real estate downturn began to strike, and thereby laid the foundation for future revivals.

The revivals, however, were slow in coming and occurred in spurts. In 1940 Florida still had the smallest population of all the Southern states. The Florida Bar was not founded until 1950. Air conditioning did not start to become widespread until after 1957. Then in 1959 the Communist Revolution in Cuba brought a new influx of entrepreneurial immigrants with a bourgeois capitalist culture.

The lower taxes, plus right-to-work and other laissez-faire legislation, attracted not only affluent transplants looking to settle down, but also impoverished refugees looking to rebuild their fortunes that had been ravaged by progressive governments.

The volume of migration from the Midwest and Northeast to Florida during all those years was much smaller than the similar migration to California. Nevertheless, in the last 10 years or so, the migration to California has been reversed, and Florida has attracted many refugees from that woke progressive state. Maybe the California legislature should have abolished income and inheritance taxes 100 years ago.

The play also highlights the importance of families in building this new frontier. The newcomers nourished both love and adventure. In the play a couple gets married in court without even waiting for a church wedding. A quickie divorce could have been obtained in Paris, but this couple stays married through an economic downturn and a killer hurricane.

Coral Gables

Today Coral Gables is considered the new Beverly Hills, displacing the California version. Coral Gables is a product of the City Beautiful movement during the Progressive Era at the beginning of the XXth century. Everything is planned, and you need prior approval in order to make any changes on your building, including giving it a new paint job and putting up signage for your business.

Coral Gables is the kind of town where the street signs are posted on the ground, making them hard to see, and public buildings are mostly prohibited from putting up signs. They take the view that if you don’t know where you are, then you don’t belong there.

The city aims at creating a suburban utopia, governed by omniscient technocrats, forming a reproduction of Andalusia, Spain in the American tropics.

Coral Gables was developed from a guava farm by a man whose father taught him and his co-workers the value of hard work and sober reflection. Careful planning and strict controls help Coral Gables avoid the blight that sometimes infects surrounding cities. This planning paid off during the hurricane of 1926, when none of its buildings were knocked down and none of its residents perished. The situation was different in nearby cities.

Also, Coral Gables never had real estate restrictions against selling to Jews or other minorities, which was not the case in Miami Beach. The core part of Coral Gables was built for the middle class, but the addition of the Deering Estate allowed for construction on larger lots with ocean access.

Miami

Miami continues to be a city of opportunity, resilience and invention. Today it attracts refugees from progressive governments not only in Latin America and even Europe, but also in the Blue States of America. These newcomers are often not at the end of their careers, ready to wind down, but instead are in the middle of their careers, eager to take on new challenges. Congressman Byron Donalds, candidate for Florida Governor next year, talks of making Miami a financial hub rivaling New York and Texas.

During Prohibition, Miami was the main hub for importing rum and whiskey from Cuba, and during the 1980’s Miami was the main hub for importing cocaine from Colombia. The local police have been so corrupt that the state legislature abolished the independent Sheriff’s office from 1966 until last year. Prohibition from 1920 to 1933 was probably the worst public health policy in the United States until the response to the Wuhan flu virus in 2020. This play includes the shooting of a bootlegger on the dock of the Flamingo Hotel.

During 2006 your correspondent’s residential contractor in Westchester County, New York, went to Florida to work on construction, which contributed to an eventual over-supply of housing. Then in 2011 we visited Miami and saw a lot of empty, see-through, condominium buildings on Brickell Avenue. In response, local real estate salesmen got busy on their fax machines and computer laptops, and reached out to potential buyers all over Latin America, Europe and Asia. Strong responses were received from Brazil, Eastern Europe and even Hong Kong. Who would not want a pied-a-terre in the United States at its most international city? For a few years thereafter, Miami led the nation in the formation of new limited liability companies, not for high-tech entrepreneurial ventures, but to purchase condominiums and other real estate.

Today Miami may be experiencing a permanent upgrade to an international capital of business and finance.

This play ends with a notorious Chicago gangster moving to Sunny South Florida. There is a suite in the Biltmore Hotel with a bullet hole from his playing around with a gun.

Tickets to attend this play may be purchased online at: www.actorsplayhouse.org, or by calling: (305) 444-9293.

Opening night also celebrates the centennial of the Coral Gables Chamber of Commerce. Tickets for the Centennial Celebration Grand Gala, which includes a VIP cocktail party and a Celebrity Chef dinner, are available at: www.coralgableschamber.org.