Incorporation, the Land Boom, and Las Olas

For most of the eighteen hundreds this was empty ground with an old fort's name attached to it. What changed everything was the railroad. Henry Flagler's Florida East Coast Railway reached the New River in eighteen ninety-six, and the first train arrived on the twenty-second of February that year.

A town grew up around the tracks and Stranahan's trading post, and on a spring day in nineteen eleven the residents voted to incorporate as the Town of Fort Lauderdale, with fewer than two hundred fifty people living inside its limits. Then came the boom. In the nineteen twenties, Florida land fever swept the state, and Fort Lauderdale caught it hard.

Developers dredged the shallow finger islands along a new roadway called Las Olas, Spanish for the waves, turning muck and mangrove into prized waterfront lots that gave the city its nickname, the Venice of America. Las Olas Boulevard had started around nineteen seventeen as a dirt track across the swamp to the beach, and within a decade it was the elegant spine of a speculators' paradise. Fortunes were made on paper almost overnight.

Almost as quickly, they would vanish, because the boom that built Fort Lauderdale was about to meet a wall of wind.