Joseph Young's Dream City to the South

Just south of Fort Lauderdale lies a whole city that one man dreamed up from nothing. In January of nineteen twenty, a California developer named Joseph Young came to South Florida hunting for land to build what he called his Dream City. He borrowed the name of a Southern California town he had loved, and so this place became Hollywood.

Young did not just sell lots. He sketched an entire vision, a grand boulevard running from the ocean west toward the Everglades, man-made lakes flanking the road, and the town carved into planned districts with a central business core, parks, a golf course, schools, and churches, an early version of what we now call zoning. In February of nineteen twenty-one he bought his first parcel for about one hundred seventy-five dollars an acre and began spending millions to raise a city from scrub and sand.

In nineteen twenty-five the residents elected him their first mayor. But like Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood was gut-punched by the nineteen twenty-six hurricane and the collapse of the boom, and Young died before his dream fully recovered. His broad beach and its famous pedestrian Broadwalk, though, are exactly where he imagined them, still drawing crowds a century later.