1 · POSITION
An Indiana boy who left school at twelve, opened a bicycle shop at seventeen, and sold the Prest-O-Lite headlamp company to Union Carbide in 1909 for millions. He built the Indianapolis Motor Speedway that year with three partners, and when it failed to draw a crowd he built a 500-mile race in 1911 that pulled eighty thousand people. He pushed the Lincoln Highway, the first transcontinental route, through in 1913. Everything he is remembered for in hospitality came after he had already made a fortune in something else.
2 · ⚑ HOW MIAMI BEACH WAS ACTUALLY ACQUIRED
John S. Collins, a Quaker farmer of seventy-five, had failed at growing avocados on the island and ran out of money building a bridge to it. Fisher lent him $50,000 in 1911 and took two hundred acres in exchange; a later loan of $150,000 brought another hundred and fifty. The Collins Bridge opened on 12 June 1913, two and a half miles of wood, the longest wooden bridge in the world, with some planks not yet nailed down. Fisher was not there — he was in Indianapolis organising a motor expedition across the Rockies.
3 · WHAT HE DID TO THE GROUND
He dredged Biscayne Bay, levelled the mangroves, used the spoil as fill, and brought in sand to make the first artificial beach. Fisher Island was created out of the same dredging in 1919. His wife Jane wrote that when they first saw the place in 1912 mosquitoes blackened our white clothing. The monument raised to him in 1941 says he carved a great city out of a jungle. This is the register’s clearest case of a resort place that is not a place at all until someone manufactures the land — the same act as the Dubai islands ninety years later, done with a dredge and no precedent.
4 · ⚑ READ AGAINST MORSE AND THE AGA KHAN
LHL-P-399 S. F. B. Morse bought a coastline that already existed and wrote a code to govern it. LHL-P-054 the Aga Khan did the same on Sardinia. Fisher had no coastline: he made one. The three together are the whole range of what an author of places can do — govern found land, buy found land, or manufacture land that was not there.
5 · ⚑ THE ENDING, WHICH THE CELEBRATORY ACCOUNTS HURRY PAST
A schooner sank in Biscayne Bay in January 1926 and blocked the port for forty-two days. On 18 September a category four hurricane hit Miami Beach; Fisher was at Montauk, where he had staked everything on repeating the trick on Long Island. Miami Beach had been the security for the Montauk financing. The hurricane killed 113 people and took the market with it; the Depression finished what was left. He ended as a handyman and died in 1939 in a small house on the beach he had made. The Library records this because a register that only carries the boom is not a record of the business.
6 · CANDOUR
⚑ Figures vary: the bridge is given as costing $150,000 and as needing $50,000 to finish, which are probably the total and the shortfall. The land is given as 200 acres for the first loan and 150 for the second. Fisher’s wealth at peak is given as $100 million and his estate as valued the same, which are not the same claim. Nothing here establishes what became of his companies or the terms on which the Montauk debt was called.