For Sale —American Paradise (28 page)

As Shannon drew closer, Shaw gave the command to gun his boat's engine, and the Coast Guard boat leapt ahead in pursuit of Shannon. Shaw shouted for Shannon to “heave-to.”

Shannon, realizing he'd been nabbed, sped for the Flamingo Hotel's yacht basin. Two men with him started throwing liquor overboard.

As the
Goose
neared the yacht basin, the Coast Guardsmen opened fire. At the sound of roaring engines and gunfire, the stylish guests at the tea dance rushed to the edge of the Flamingo's docks to watch. Others aboard anchored yachts looked up from their cocktails at the drama being played out under their noses.

Hotel owner Carl Fisher also watched.

The Coast Guard crew later said they started shooting only to try to disable Shannon's boat, but the bootlegger was gravely wounded. The
Goose
docked at the Flamingo, and Shannon staggered off the boat. Someone brought a mattress from the hotel, and Shannon collapsed onto it.

An ambulance was summoned, and Shannon was taken to Allison Hospital in Miami Beach. His companions were arrested and taken to jail.

Shannon reportedly bore no ill will toward the man who'd shot him. When he was told that he would not recover from the bullet wound that had pierced his liver, Shannon—ever the carefree sportsman—reportedly said that that was just part of the game.

He died the following day. The story of the deadly chase across Biscayne Bay made national headlines.

Witnesses—including Carl Fisher—testified at a coroner's hearing that Shannon was shot after he and his two companions on the
Goose
had raised their hands in surrender. Philip Shaw was indicted for murder, but was acquitted two years later.

As the end of the 1925–26 season approached, the torrent of visitors that had been pouring into Florida for more than a year finally slowed, and real estate sales slowed dramatically, due at least in part to warnings about Florida real estate in national newspapers and a slump in the stock market.

In Stuart, backers of a development called River Forest made a drastic attempt to lure buyers. In a series of large ads in the
South Florida Developer
, they announced that they would bury a sack of money on the property they were offering for sale, and the public would be allowed to look for it on March 13.

“Whoever finds the money owns it,” the ad read.

Tampa attorney Peter Knight, whose name would soon become a lightning rod for controversy when it came to information on Florida, was given space in the
New York Evening Post
to go into great detail about Florida's wonders.

Knight avoided the gushing, florid prose used by the purveyors of paradise. He concentrated instead on statistics—bank deposits, annual yield per acre of crops, population growth, lumber production, pounds of fish, barrels of crabs, clams, and oysters. It was a dull read, but Knight wasn't aiming for starry-eyed paradise seekers. His target audience was the hard-nosed businessman who might have recently hesitated to sink money into Florida.

Knight's turgid, numbers-laden piece seemed precise, but it included one very misleading paragraph.

“Although [Florida's] development has been extraordinarily rapid, necessitating an immense expenditure of money, it has no bonded indebtedness,” he wrote. “It does not owe a dollar.”

That was true about Florida's state government, but Knight was a lawyer, and like any good attorney, he was presenting only the facts that supported his client's case, excluding anything that might harm that case. The “immense expenditure of money” spent during Florida's rapid development had to come from somewhere. The growing cities had not turned to the state to pay for the sewer capacity and roads and streetlights and other infrastructure needed to serve populations that were increasing by the day. Riding the crest of what seemed like endless good times, they had issued municipal bonds that were purchased by investors who expected to make money. The bonds had to be repaid with interest, however, and that repayment with interest was a debt.

Soon, towns and cities across Florida would be struggling mightily to make payments on those bonds. But, as Knight and the
Wall Street Journal
would so stridently point out, Florida's state government would remain free of such obligations. And they would fail to mention the crippling debt being carried by many of the state's municipal governments.

St. Petersburg was already beginning to see the effects of the slowing of real estate sales and a consequent slowdown in building. About six thousand mechanics and their families had left the city.

“The outskirts were filled with abandoned houses,” said Walter Fuller, who only a year or so earlier was making more money than he had time to count. “People made precarious livings stealing sidewalk tile from abandoned subdivisions.”

By late spring, even Edwin Menninger was acknowledging that times were changing. On May 14, he announced that the
South Florida Developer
would reduce its publication schedule from twice a week to once a week.

Menninger said he'd gone to twice-
weekly publication two years earlier when he was getting more advertising than he could possibly publish in just one issue per week. But he'd never expected that the
Developer
would remain a semi-weekly, and he hadn't raised subscription prices for that reason.

“We felt that a depression must come in Florida sooner or later, and the present stagnant market justifies our belief,” he wrote on the
Developer
's editorial page.

He also noted that the advertising that had paid for two issues a week wasn't there anymore. Advertisers who had believed more than a year earlier that good times would continue and had signed long contracts now couldn't afford the space they'd bought.

The advertisers who had signed those extended contracts were released from that obligation, Menninger wrote.

In the same issue of the
Developer
, Menninger also wrote a long, thoughtful, and analytical article urging readers to “put the brakes on speculation.” The days of fast, easy money from fat real estate profits were gone, he said.

“The balloon is blooey,” he wrote. “You have had all the soft pickings that you are going to get. In the future you can expect to get dollars only in exchange for work.”

Menninger's opinion that Florida's boom days were over infuriated some people, including Stuart city commissioner Cornelius Van Anglen.

Not long after his lengthy story in the
Developer
, Menninger slipped quietly into an afternoon meeting of the board of commissioners and sat down on a stool to watch.

Van Anglen halted the meeting, announcing that there was “a traitor” in the room, and made a motion that Menninger be removed from the meeting.

Mayor Harry Dyer conferred briefly with the town attorney about the legality of such a motion, then announced that he would not allow it. Van Anglen angrily left the meeting.

Still, Arthur Brisbane certainly was doing what he could to keep things humming in Stuart. On April 4, Solomon Davies Warfield decided the time was right to announce that Brisbane had bought ten thousand acres in Florida.

Brisbane paid $800,000 for his land, adjacent to the St. Lucie Canal, where the tracks for Warfield's Seaboard Air Line Railroad crossed the canal. It also adjoined land owned by Seaboard's “Development Department.”

Brisbane planned to use his land as a farm to demonstrate Florida's “extraordinary fertility” and the advantages of its climate for farming.

Because of its proximity to the canal and Seaboard's tracks, nearby Indian-town would become a divisional headquarters for the railroad, with repair and maintenance shops for its locomotives and rolling stock, Warfield said.

Brisbane was back on the front page of the
South Florida Developer
on June 11. Edwin Menninger's lead story for that edition reported that Brisbane was about to start work on his farm west of Stuart. Brisbane wrote a self-
serving
sidebar for the
Developer
, again urging the state to build a cross-state waterway and make improvements to the St. Lucie Canal.

Brisbane called on the collective wisdom of the people of Florida to urge the state to take on the construction projects.

Reporter Marie D. Peffer, a former employee of Brisbane's, interviewed him at the fourteenth annual Indianapolis 500 on May 31, 1926. The story was published in the
South Florida Developer
's edition of June 18, 1926.

“You may quote me as saying that I consider Stuart to be one of the coming largest cities in Florida,” Brisbane told Peffer.

Powerful hurricanes don't usually form in the Atlantic Basin in July. But occasionally the waters of the Caribbean Sea have become warm enough in the early summer to sustain a major hurricane, and that's what happened in late July 1926.

The storm began on July 22 as a tropical depression just east of the Leeward Islands near the eastern edge of the Caribbean Sea. The storm became a hurricane as it moved northwestward across the Caribbean, but it did not become an especially powerful storm until after it had crossed the Dominican Republic and entered the Bahamas.

Then it quickly intensified into a monster storm with winds of around 140 miles an hour as it approached Nassau.

The hurricane struck that city on the evening of Sunday, July 25. Nassau residents at first thought the hurricane would miss their city, but by nightfall it was clear that it was headed their way.

“There was little sleep that night for anyone on the island, just listening to this merciless crashing and tearing and roaring, and wondering what would be the outcome,” the
Nassau Guardian
reported.

The outcome was very bad. The storm continued to rage at dawn, and the light “revealed a town lashed unceasingly by a pitiless wind intent on demolishing everything in its track, and driving rain as fine as smoke,” the
Guardian
said.

The hurricane weakened some as it reached the northwest edge of the Bahamas, but it still had winds of perhaps 120 miles an hour, and its northwestward track put it on a course for Miami.

But the storm turned slightly more northward, and its most powerful winds stayed offshore and missed Miami. The hurricane's eye came ashore at Cape Canaveral, about 175 miles up the coast from Miami.

The worst that Miami saw was winds of 80 miles an hour. Still, the storm downed trees and power lines as it passed through the city. F. A. Lancaster, a line-man, was electrocuted while repairing power lines in Miami Beach.

It was the first hurricane for many of Miami's newcomers, and they thought they'd seen the worst that nature could throw at them.

While the hurricane of July 1926 was not powerful enough to inflict catastrophic damage in Florida, it created an image problem for the Florida Association of Real Estate Boards. In the heady, go-
go days of the real estate boom, optimistic developers had erected grand entrances to their “ideal cities.” In many cases, those grandiose entrances were all that was built.

Now, neglected for months, they were becoming shabby, and the hurricane's winds had been powerful enough to knock many of them askew. In abandoned developments where grandiose entrances had been built—often of nothing more than chicken wire and plaster—and streets had been laid out, the entrances were shredded, street signs were leaning, and other signs had been battered by the winds.

It was a reminder that some dreams had not materialized. The Florida Association of Real Estate Boards wanted these embarrassing eyesores removed. It wasn't good for business.

Florida was getting a lot of drive-
by scrutiny from national publications, and the messages were mixed. In August,
Forbes
magazine said Florida was financially sound despite the unfair treatment it was receiving in the national press. The state's banking troubles were being exaggerated, and the problems that did exist were being caused by a weak chain of banks in Georgia.