Port Everglades and the Wedding of the Waters
Near Fort Lauderdale, Florida
Just south of the beach lies one of the busiest cruise ports on the planet, and it was born from a single dramatic act of engineering. For years this was known only as Lake Mabel, a shallow inland lagoon walled off from the Atlantic by a bar of sand. Local boosters had been demanding a deep water port since at least nineteen eleven.
The breakthrough came on the twenty second of February, nineteen twenty eight, in a ceremony they called the Wedding of the Waters. President Calvin Coolidge, sitting in the White House hundreds of miles away, pressed a remote signal that set off a dynamite blast, blowing open the channel that finally married Lake Mabel to the sea. That single explosion created Port Everglades.
Today it runs more than forty feet deep, which makes it the deepest port in the United States south of Norfolk, Virginia, deep enough to swallow the largest cruise ships built. In a recent year it moved close to five million cruise passengers, ranking it among the very busiest cruise ports in the world, alongside its heavy trade in cargo and petroleum. It is owned not by the city but by Broward County.
What looks like a natural harbor was, in truth, blasted into existence in a single afternoon.
