All aboard the Orange Blossom Special to Florida - a movable hotel

 

Postcard 1939 - Orange Blossom Special
Public Domain

By Jane Feehan

Some called visitors to Florida during the 1920s “the sunshine seekers.” Many hoped to cash in on the booming Florida real estate market. Most arrived by train.

Travel by train was also booming. Solomon Davies Warfield (1859-1927), president of Seaboard Airline Railroad (SAL) envisioned a formula for success in the Sunshine State: join service from the west to the east coast of Florida, provide premier, luxury services, and publicize.

Service from New York to Florida was provided along the tracks of several rail companies. But it was the train, the Orange Blossom Special, that received high praise.

“Travelers have become so sensitive and particular that they flutter with indignation if they can’t have their bath and their barber, hothouse strawberries and other such luxuries while on the train,” wrote The Miami Herald in early 1926.

The Orange Blossom Special operated as a “hotel on wheels” with maids, valets, manicurists, barber shops and hairdressers.  Also featured: a ladies’ observation car. Some Pullman cars used by SAL offered accommodations with bathtubs or showers. Service included bellhops (many Filipinos), and chef-inspired, fine dining in a car with paintings of orange blossom branches and other fruit on a background of gray paint.

Orange Blossom Special service officially connected the two coasts, terminating in West Palm Beach, January 28,1925 after a brief weather delay (reported The Miami News and The Miami Herald). Dates seem to vary on inaugural service depending on sources; accounts may have confused initial service to Miami in 1927. 

That first trip in 1925 involved six Pullman cars filled with representatives of Miami, including Coral Gables developer George E. Merrick, and West Palm Beach and SAL executives.

The Miami Tribune described the Orange Blossom Special as “one of America’s finest trains” traveling to and from New York in 35 hours with its trip through the Scenic Highlands {sic] of Central Florida. 

In August 1926, The Miami Herald reported the “Orange Blossom Special has become a famous train almost overnight.” 

Orange Blossom arrives in 
Miami 1927,
Florida State Archives

Whether by popular demand or seeking increased profits, Warfield arranged for the Orange Blossom Special to make its first through-trip from West Palm Beach to Miami on January 8, 1927. 

The train stopped in Fort Lauderdale that day for about 20 minutes. Mayor John Tidball greeted Governor John Martin, SAL’s Warfield and several hundred dignitaries at the train station off West Fourth Street. 

Big  crowds awaited the Orange Blossom Special in Miami: 15,000 residents were on hand at the Miami station and another 10,000 at Royal Palm Park, near the Seaboard Airline Railway office in the Lorraine Arcade on Southeast First Street.

Rail lines connecting
Orange Blossom Special (Florida State Archives) 1936

The winter-service only Orange Blossom Special hummed along for several decades. Service was suspended during World War II to accommodate military efforts. The train, originally a heavy steam-driven locomotive, was not fast. Nor was it economical to maintain with yearly interior and exterior painting. Travel times, however, improved to fewer more than 24 hours before its final trip April 13, 1953.

Today, the romance of the Orange Blosom Special lives through the lyrics and music of the bluegrass song by Ervin T. Rouse (1917-1981), the Orange Blossom Special (https://genius.com/Johnny-cash-orange-blossom-special-lyrics).  

Ride the train and lose those New York blues, to paraphrase the song. Contemporary lyrics might say “get to Florida any way you can to lose those New York, Chicago or Los Angeles blues."

 Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. Jane Feehan.

Sources:

The Miami News, Dec. 30, 1924

The Miami News, April 25, 1925

The Miami Herald, Jan. 17, 1926

Miami Daily News, Jan. 24, 1925

The Miami Herald, Jan. 26, 1925

The Miami Tribune, March 17, 1926

The Miami Herald, Aug. 20, 1926

Fort Lauderdale Daily News, Dec. 7, 1926

The Miami Herald, Jan. 9, 1927

The Miami Herald, Oct. 21, 1941

CorridorRail.com

TransportationHistory.org

Wikipedia

Tags: Orange Blossom Special. Florida railways, Seaboard Airline Railroad, Seaboard Airline Railway, S, Davies Warfield, 

New Year 2024, meet Miami headlines from 1924

 

Miami 1924 - State Archives of Florida/Romer

Below is a sampling of headlines from sections of the Miami News-Metropolis of January 1, 1924. A mix of local and national stories show how some themes remain the same a century later.

Panoramic view of Coral Gables from Water Tower Showing Development of Two-year-old Town

Coral Gables from the water tower 1924

 

Thousands See Monster Parade  - Seven miles of floats pass in colorful array

Fruit and Flower Pageant – 40,000 view the parade that stretched more than 100 blocks. It was a “typical June day in January.” Note: Miami held a variety of parades in its early days, including Labor Day, Shriner’s, Palm Fete and Orange Bowl parades. See index or search for Orange Bowl.

 

Construction of Large Concrete Fronton at Hialeah for Spanish Game of Jai Alai Introduced from Cuba Opened Feb. 2, 1924 (see index for short history). Most are closed today, but one still operates in Dania.

 

Hialeah Fronton 1924 State Archives of Florida

 U.S. Stirred Over Obregon Lack of Force  

“Washington hopes Mexican revolution will be halted … disappointed over its failure to solve internal problems…policy limits supply of arms.” Alvaro Obregon served as president of Mexico from 1920-1924. Deemed a centrist and peacemaker, he was assassinated in 1928.

 

Mystery Marks Liquor Supply in Washington

“Unusual conditions for guzzlers.” Why has so much illicit liquor appeared during the holiday season, the reporter asks (Prohibition – 18th Amendment, 1920 – 1933). Conflict arose between local police and federal agents about enforcing the law against liquor. Confiscated liquor disappeared or mysteriously “turned into water.”

 

Man with a drink in tourist photo booth at Hardie's Bathing Casino
during Prohibition 1920-1933 State Archives of Florida

Democrats See Chance to Win in 1924 Election

“Politically the coming year holds more at issue than is usually the case.”

Calvin Coolidge, Republican, succeeded Warren G. Harding as president when he unexpectedly died in 1923. A booming economy and world peace favored Coolidge, who won the 1924 election as the second vice president tapped as president via circumstance who later won the presidency in an election.

President Calvin Coolidge and wife Grace
State of Florida Archives

Tags: Miami in the 1920s, Miami Jai Alai Fronton, Fruit and Flower Pageant 

Florida: a state of superlatives and high hopes in 1921 ... and today?

 

Baggage at Florida East Coast Railway Depot 1921
Florida State Archives

Newspapers played a big part in promoting Florida during the boom days of the early 1920s.  The Miami Metropolis was no exception. In 1921 stories about building and farming splashed across its pages:

• Few realize the extent of Great Reclamation Project at Back Door of Miami

• Vast Area in Everglades Now Being Farmed

• Miami Leads Entire State in Building

Miami 1921
Florida State Archives

Among the stories of the day was a summary of Florida superlatives. Time, no doubt, has altered Florida’s first place status in some. Many of these firsts were in agriculture. Others became realties a few decades later and remain so today.

Florida has first place:

In diversity of food products

In value per acre of farm products

In untilled area that is tillable

In number of growing days

In phosphate mining

In fishing industries

In Fuller’s earth output

In variety of trees
In area of standing timber

In length of coastline

In variety of birds
In winter-grown truck products

In coconuts
In camphor

In variety of hay crops
In sisal

Florida is:

The orchardist’s lotus-land

The trucker’s opportunity
The farmer's three chances a year

The fisherman’s Galilee

The lumberman’s last stand

The beeman's land of milk and honey

The dairyman’s flowing bowl

The filmmaker’s dream

The home seeker’s goal

The citizen’s cornucopia

The manufacturer's future

What's Florida first in today? 

Freedom

Boating from Belle Glade to Fort Lauderdale 1921
Florida State Archives

Source:

Miami Daily Metropolis, Oct, 25, 1921

Tags: Florida history, Florida in the 1920s, Florida boom, Florida boom times, 1920s South Florida , Florida boom, film researcher

Miami Beach's first oceanside grand - Roney Plaza Hotel

Roney Plaza Hotel, circa 1930 - Florida State Archives/Florida Memory

By Jane Feehan

The Roney Plaza Hotel opened in February, 1926. Built by N.B.T. Roney (Newton Baker Taylor Roney) of Camden, NJ, the $2 million project was the first large luxury hotel on the ocean in Miami Beach.*

Roney, a lawyer who was more interested in construction than law, first came to Miami in 1909 passing through on a trip from Cuba. With investment notions, he returned to the Magic City in 1918. The following year, he bought the Biscayne Hotel on Flagler and Washington Avenue. Roney gained notoriety as a wheeler dealer or “Man with the Golden Touch.”  News accounts relate his quick deals and spectacular purchases in New Jersey and Florida.   

In 1924 Roney announced his plan for a luxurious hotel in Miami Beach. The site for the Roney Plaza - Collins Avenue at 23^rd and 24^th streets – was purchased from from T.J. Pancoast and John S. Collins during February, 1925. Roney hired New York architectural firm Schultze and Weaver* to design the most ambitious of his 30 ongoing projects in Miami Beach.

A year later advertisements for the opening of the Roney Plaza Hotel welcomed visitors to elegant dining, 15 acres of formal gardens and gracious rooms. It became the place to vacation in Miami Beach, drawing European royalty, high society, and Hollywood notables. Roney hosted NJ Governor Morgan F. Larson - one of many prominent politicos who were to stay at the hotel - for his three-week honeymoon during the 1920s. 

Roney Plaza Hotel circa 1920 Florida State Archives

Neither the devastating hurricane of 1926, from which the hotel emerged structurally sound, nor the Depression stopped Roney from adding to and improving his hotel. In 1931 Roney spent $200,000 to build a pool and cabana colony. He sold his interest in the profitable Roney Plaza to Henry L. Doherty, a financier, utilities expert and oilman, in 1933.

With a string of owners, the hotel continued to take center stage in Miami Beach until it faded in the 1950s; other glamorous hotels such as the Fontainebleau competed for the limelight. The Roney Plaza was torn down in 1968, making way for the Roney Apartments. Today, after a $25 million renovation, the building stands as the Roney Palace, a resort and condominium.* 

Copyright © 2012. All rights reserved. Jane Feehan.

 _________

* Carl Fisher's Flamingo Hotel was actually the first grand hotel in Miami Beach but it sat on the bay side.

*The firm also designed the Coral Gables Biltmore, Miami’s Freedom Tower, and the Waldorf Astoria in New York.

*Roney died in 1952. He left a rare map collection to the University of Miami in Coral Gables and a legacy of being one of Miami Beach's most significant developers.

Sources:

Miami News, July 3, 1922

Kleinberg, Howard. Woggles and Cheese Holes. Miami Beach: The Greater Miami & Beaches Hotel Association (2005)

Florida International University archives

USGenWeb Archives

Tags: Miami Beach hotel history, Miami Beach history, Miami Beach during the 1920s, Florida hotel history, first large, luxury ocean front hotel in Miami Beach,  Roney Plaza Hotel

Rex Ingram on Miami film studio: We got no cooperation on Passion Vine

By Jane Feehan

“Next movie will tax all Miami facilities for scenes and props,” the Aug, 22, 1922 Miami Daily Metropolis headline claimed.

The picture, Passion Vine, set in the South Pacific and directed by Rex Ingram (1892-1950), would include a live shark attack, a palm-tree-lined beach, and jungle waterfalls for the climatic final scene. Props would also include musical instruments, an assortment of odd articles and a collection of “natives.”

The natives were provided by Seminole Willie Willie. The Indians, said Miami Studios, Inc. principle John Brunton, held a highly developed dramatic instinct, weeping realistically and enacting mob scenes with a singular expertise.

The story rang enthusiastic for the budding movie industry in Hialeah, a Miami suburb. Dublin-born Ingram was considered “one of the world’s best, if not the best, directors in the world.” To have him make a picture with wife and popular leading lady Alice Terry (1899-1987) at the Hialeah studio was a promising sign of things to come.

A news story nearly four months later did not wax as enthusiastic. On Dec. 1, Ingram, as he was to leave with his crew to film the valley scene in Cuba instead of Puerto Rico, complained that he should have visited Miami first himself, instead of sending a representative.  

Ingram told the reporter that the picture cost $125,000 over budget and that they should have wrapped it up three weeks earlier. Rains dogged the production. “I didn’t know I was coming to Miami in the middle of the hurricane season.”  He also groused about the lack of studio equipment, poor laboratory work and incompetent assistants.  

“We got no cooperation at Hialeah,” said Ingram. “Workers did not take to pictures seriously.” Some were told to stay late to finish painting the set one night and instead left at 5 to see a picture show; he and his crew had to find brushes and complete the work themselves.

Ingram did not leave without thanking Brunton, whose hands, the director said, were tied because of the lack of capital. He heaped praise on those who provided their beach-side houses and pools for some of the scenes and thanked Captain Thompson for rounding up a few sharks for the drama.

The movie, based on John Russell’s novel, Passion Vine, is also known as Where the Pavement Ends. The film is lost. The picture, with its “cast of 1000s” opened in Miami at the Fairfax in March, 1923. Before making the Passion Vine, Director Ingram considered Black Orchids, and Trifling Women to be his best works.

Ingram opened a studio in France in 1923 where, perhaps, he found more cooperation, dryer weather and better equipment. He left the movie industry a year or two later after a failed picture he made in Morocco and returned to Los Angeles where he sculpted and wrote.  Hialeah dropped out of the picture making scene not long afterward.

Sources: 

Palm Beach Post, April 10, 1922

Miami Daily Metropolis, Aug. 22, 1922

Miami Daily Metropolis, Dec. 1, 1922

Miami Daily Metrolpolis March 22, 1923

Wikipedia

 Tags: Miami history, Hialeah history, Miami film industry, film researcher, Jane Feehan, history of Miami

Hialeah Park opens in 1925 with creative betting

Hialeah Park
Florida State Archives/Florida Memory Postcard collection

Hialeah Park

East 4th Avenue
Hialeah, FL

https://hialeahparkcasino.com/

By Jane Feehan

Hialeah Park Race Track, developed by Missouri cattleman James Bright and aviation pioneer Glen Curtis, opened for thoroughbred races January 15, 1925.  Thousands of fans jammed the new park, nicknamed the “Longchamps of America,”* to watch horses run the one mile track.

The Miami Daily News reported the festivities; excerpts follow:

… Innovation after innovation greeted the thousands at the track this afternoon.

Unlike the grass lawns at other tracks, the Miami sward is a fast stretch of grey black tied concrete sweeping gently to the rail of the home stretch.

The band stand, a 20-foot enclosure that was sunken in the center of the lawn and surrounded by a high yellow daubed picket fence, was the stage for the famous Frank Novak band ...  Activity centered in the club house, a Spanish type structure. Two balconies were crowded with the smart set, a few dining between races in the beautiful buff and green paneled dining room.

Another Miami Daily News story of the same day anticipated the Hialeah visit of “Englishwoman bookmaker” Helen Vernet en route to the U.S. aboard the Mauritania. Claimed to be from one of oldest families in Great Britain, Vernet followed the horses to make fast money. She became a broker for Ladbroke and Company, the “largest turf commissioners in the world” where she handled more than $25 million in bets. She was anxious to see - and probably place a wager at - Hialeah.

She may have been disappointed with the betting situation at the Florida track. Pari-mutuel gambling was not legal then but track operators got creative. They developed an oral system of betting as well as a more complex “certificate plan” in which the betting tickets were sold as stocks (for one such system at the Pompano track in the 1920s see index for post about Judge Shippey).

Pari-mutuel betting was passed by the Florida legislature in May, 1931, but Governor Fuller Warren vetoed it because of a rumored (and later assessed as well-founded) payoff from a Dade County businessman. A month later, a compromise was reached in which each county, regardless of its size, would share equally in tax proceeds of pari-mutuels; it gave the Florida Senate enough votes to override the governor’s veto in June, 1931.

As for Hialeah Park Race Track, it was severely damaged by the 1926 hurricane. Joseph Widener and partner Edward R. Bradley purchased, renovated and re-opened the track in 1932 to wide and decades-long acclaim. The park closed in 2001 but opened again in 2009 and now offers a casino. Today Hialeah Park is on the National Register of Historic . Copyright © 2012. All rights reserved. Jane Feehan.

*Longchamps is a race track along the banks of the Seine River in Paris, France.
-----

Sources:

Miami Daily News, Jan. 15, 1925

Miami News, Aug. 8, 1978

www.hialeahparkracing.com


Tags: Hialeah history,  Miami history, Florida racing history, Florida gambling history, Florida history, film researcher, 

Sea Hornet II comes to Miami - a little sub with big prospects

By Jane Feehan

According to the Miami Daily Metropolis, the Sea Hornet II, a torpedo boat that “almost revolutionized submarine warfare” during the world war and will probably revolutionize American Coast Guard defenses,” slipped into Miami and moored at the Biscayne Bay Yacht club in February, 1921.

The small sub, invented and built by W.B. Shearer, a torpedo expert for the navy, was constructed for $1.5 million. It could fire the largest torpedo made, was fireproof, and non-sinkable. Shearer sailed the boat from New York at 20 knots an hour to St. Augustine, where he entered what was known then as the East Coast canal (now the Intracoastal Waterway) and continued to Miami. The torpedo expert planned to bring the sub through some sea trials in Biscayne Bay before heading to the U.S. Navy base in Key West for government experiments.

The Metropolis reported that the boat’s capabilities were divulged to the U.S. Navy in 1917. It was one of the war’s “secrets.” Plans were made to build a fleet of them in England to use in a simultaneous attack on German naval bases; signing of the armistice halted those plans.

Shearer told the Metropolis reporter that the Navy was about to conduct experiments to test the advisability of creating a fleet for use in coastal defense. The sub was fast and simple in design. The 58-foot craft had a nine and a half foot beam and drew three and a half feet of water. It was painted dark gray, held a small mast atop a high bow that disappeared when in action. Two men operated the Sea Hornet but it could hold four.

“The Sea Hornet can be on its way in 32 seconds after firing,” said Shearer. The sub could make a getaway doing 34 mph with its 300-horsepower engines and could get within 1000 feet of another before being detected.

Did the Sea Hornet revolutionize sub warfare? I can't find additional information on what happened to this torpedo boat. After wars, Congress often cuts back defense spending; the Sea Hornet may have fallen victim to that.  A simple, low-cost boat like the Sea Hornet may have come in handy during World War II when German subs stirred up trouble along the Atlantic seaboard.

Sources:

New York Times, Dec. 12, 1920:  http://tinyurl.com/cwqfpoy

Miami Daily Metropolis, Feb 1, 1921

Tags: experimental submarines after World War I, Miami during the 1920s, Miami history, warship history,  historical researcher, Florida history, maritime history

Loggerhead turtle racing to eclipse all watersports ... 1921

Today’s animal activists would gasp at the loggerhead sea turtle race held on Miami Beach - then often referred to as Miami by the Sea -  at the Roman pools in 1921. It was promoted as “the biggest aquatic event which has ever been billed in Miami Beach.”

                     

Scouts combed the Florida Keys for weeks to find worthy loggerhead contestants, which average 300 pounds. The Miami Metropolis reported that “turtle racing in the Bahamas is what baseball is to the United States” and, up to that point, had never been held in the U.S.

Capt. Charles S. Thompson, a popular fishing guide in Miami who claimed President Warren G. Harding among his customers and friends, was tapped to be one of the turtle riders because he “knows more about the sport than any other man hereabouts.”

The Metropolis described the upcoming event:

The sea turtles will be harnessed and driven from a line on the pool across the pool and back by men astride the turtles. It requires skill and a knowledge of the ways of the big turtles to win a race.  The movie men will be there to see that the race is given the proper attention in the weekly news pictures in the great cities of the world.

Today the loggerhead sea turtle, the state saltwater reptile of Florida, is designated a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.

Sources:

Miami Metropolis, July 31,1921

Miami News, May 17, 1929

Tags: Miami Beach history, loggerhead sea turtles in Florida, Florida film researcher,  historical researcher