The History of Florida (107 page)

foundly the way we lived, worked, played, even slept. Air-conditioning has

become so omnipresent that we forget how recently climate control arrived

in Florida. We also take for granted the manifold changes resulting from

this new technology. Floridians, of course, had always been keenly—and

physical y—aware of the importance of passive cooling. Southern architects

and carpenters understood the science and culture of passive cooling: wide

verandahs, high ceilings, cross-ventilation, louvered jalousies, the central

breezeway, and fast-growing chinaberry trees to cast shade. The riddle of

removing humidity went unsolved until a nineteenth-century Apalachicola

physician experimented with a steam-driven ice-making machine. John

Gorrie’s hospital patients, stricken with yellow fever, improved in the me-

chanical y produced chilled air, establishing an early precedent for twenti-

eth-century air-conditioning.

In 1929, Wil is Carrier introduced the modern, prototype air condi-

proof

tioner. Stil , air-conditioning for most urban Floridians in the 1930s and

1940s meant a visit to the movie theater or department store. Trains and

buses bringing travelers to Florida were air-conditioned by the end of the

1930s, and a few hotels had air-conditioned bal rooms by the early 1940s, but

otherwise tourists had the privilege of sweating in the semitropical heat just

as the Florida natives did. The end of World War II, however, with its rush

of accumulated savings and applied technology, soon introduced affordable

window air-conditioning units. Houses and apartments, motels and shops,

began sprouting the boxy window units in the 1950s, and the new technol-

ogy was cooling planes and cars by the end of the decade. Air-conditioning

augured stil another New South, celebrated by historian Raymond Arse-

nault as “the end of the long hot summer.”5

Air-conditioning, however, created a gradual rather than a sudden im-

pact on sweltering Florida summers. As late as 1960, only 18 percent of all

Florida households had air-conditioning, and only a scant 2 percent of

African American households. The decade of the 1960s ushered it in on a

massive scale, as homes utilizing climate control increased to 60 percent by

1970, to 84 percent by 1980, and to over 90 percent in the 1990s. By 1980,

512 · Raymond A. Mohl and Gary R. Mormino

moreover, almost half of Florida’s African American households had ad-

opted air-conditioning. Certainly, the ubiquitous whirring of the central air

unit made Florida more attractive year-round to retirees.

Florida homes that once obeyed the environmental imperatives of a trop-

ical climate—“hot air rises and water may”—took on new forms, materials,

and functions. Low ceilings, concrete-block wal s, and TV rooms replaced

high ceilings, wooden wal s, and screened Florida rooms. Air-conditioning

permitted Floridians to orient lives around schedules no longer dependent

upon summer afternoon storms or seasonal change. Schools, which once

began classes in late September or October, now begin in late August—

just as in Philadelphia and Chicago. Floridians, who like other southerners

had historical y maintained a close association with the land, now became

more detached from the natural world, cruising in air-conditioned cars to

climate-controlled mal s and offices, to domed stadiums, to housing devel-

opments with disassociated names such as Cypress Bend or Panther Trace.

Air-conditioning has allowed Floridians to keep their sunshine and “cool it”

twelve months a year. Florida’s fantastic trajectory of population growth in

the decades after 1950 would almost certainly have flattened out without the

introduction and widespread adoption of air-conditioning. Tourists, who

once regularly abandoned Florida between June and December, found that

proof

a controlled temperature means no seasonal boundaries. Once a six-month

industry, tourism became a year-round business.

Tourism first attracted attention in the years fol owing the Civil War,

when smal numbers of winter visitors arrived in Fernandina and Jack-

sonvil e. Many found their way on steamships up the St. Johns River and

along the crooked Ocklawaha, destination Silver Springs. But if the 1870s

belonged to charming stern-wheelers and glass-bottomed boats, the 1880s

and 1890s unleashed a decade of conspicuous consumption in the building

of elaborate Florida hotels—the Ponce de Leon, the Royal Poinciana, the

Belleview Biltmore, and the Royal Palm. The Gilded Age set had arrived in

Florida, traveling the rails of Henry M. Flagler and Henry B. Plant.

The 1920s unveiled a new Florida with new forms of pleasure. New free-

doms, generated by economic prosperity and inventive genius, created a

national consumer culture. The symbols of the era—Ford Flivvers, Palm

Beach, Coral Gables, Miami Beach, and the Tamiami Trail—underscored

the interlocking destinies of tourism and economic growth. Tourism and

real estate speculation supplied the oxygen for Florida’s boom. “Al of

America’s gold rushes,” noted journalist Mark Sul ivan in his classic
Our

Boom, Bust, and Uncertainty: A Social History of Modern Florida · 513

Times
(1935), “all her oil booms, and her free-land stampedes, dwindled by

comparison . . . with the torrent of migration pouring into Florida.”6

The promise of Florida, the dreams of the good life under sunshine and

palm, on golf course and sandy beach, melded into compelling and roman-

tic images. Dreams could be packaged into residential lots, gated develop-

ments, and municipal campgrounds. Historical y, American cities evolved

by developing commerce, industry, and transportation, but Florida cities

such as Daytona Beach and Sarasota, St. Petersburg and Miami Beach sold

themselves, promoting their beaches, salt air, endless sunshine, and the

Florida dream. St. Petersburg appealed to frugal, middle-class midwestern-

ers, while Miami Beach attracted a nouveau riche crowd interested in fish-

ing, golf, polo, jai alai, horse racing, and gambling.

Postwar Florida came to embody and in turn radiate the values of a new

American culture: youth, speed, leisure, consumption, mobility, and afflu-

ence. Tourism figured prominently in this midcentury culture. Television

enhanced the image of Florida as the Sunshine State. Most Americans were

familiar with the Miami-based TV shows of Arthur Godfrey and Jackie

Gleason, both of whom shared affection for the good life in the Sunbelt

before that concept had been invented. Dozens of glamorous new hotels

went up on Miami Beach in the 1950s, including the extravagant and glitzy

proof

beachfront Fontainebleau. The publicity machine, one journalistic account

noted in 1964, was “like a huge bal yhoo generator that never shuts down.

Its output voltage is always there, waiting to stun the unwary.”7 Not surpris-

ingly, tourism began hitting new peaks in the postwar era. In 1933, officials

estimated that about a mil ion tourists arrived in Florida. By 1940, they

numbered 2.8 million, and that number increased exponential y to 5 mil-

lion in 1950, 20 million in 1980, 40 million in 1990, and 86 million in 2011. A

$32 billion industry by the mid-1990s, tourism became, truly, the bedrock

of Florida’s economy.

These raw statistics provide sparse insight into the myriad meanings of

a tourist economy and its consequences. In the halcyon 1950s, Florida’s top

tourist attractions were Marineland, near St. Augustine, and Cypress Gar-

dens, along Highway 441. In 1956, Miami and Miami Beach sparkled as the

crown jewels of tourism, attracting nearly one-quarter of the state’s visitors.

Mostly, tourists came to pre-1970 Florida to luxuriate in the state’s natural

beauty, however “natural” attractions such as Cypress Gardens were. The

opening of Disney World in 1971, however, inaugurated a dramatic new

chapter. By the 1980s, it had become the world’s greatest tourist attraction,

514 · Raymond A. Mohl and Gary R. Mormino

A part of hotel row on Miami Beach in April 1959. The hundreds of white sun-splashed

hotels, both art deco and contemporary, became Florida’s best-known architectural

features in the years before the erection of the rocket gantries at Cape Canaveral and

the Magic Kingdom turrets at Disney World. Described as the American Riviera of the

leisured masses, Miami Beach attracted visitors not only to a year-round balmy surf

proof

but to 500 swimming pools, elegant shops on Collins Avenue, and a myriad of restau-

rants, cocktail lounges, and show bars. Since the mid-1980s, the beach has enjoyed a

second boom of tourism and night life.

and continues to draw more than 17 million tourists annual y. Disney’s fan-

tasy landscape meshed perfectly with the modern culture of leisure and

consumption. The surging growth of the Orlando area over the past forty

years has been based largely on the appeal of Mickey Mouse, but Sea World,

Disney’s EPCOT, Disney’s Animal Kingdom, Disney’s Hol ywood Studios,

and Universal Studios’ Islands of Adventure lure an additional 50 million

visitors annual y. Theme parks and attractions created artificial worlds of

elaborately contrived environments where tourists “experienced” Thunder

Mountain but rarely appreciated the real Florida.

Retirement rivaled tourism as a driving force behind Florida’s postwar

growth. The same palm tree, golf course, and beach imagery that attracted

tourists also brought retirees. Postwar guidebooks with irresistible titles

paved the way. George and Jane Dusenbury’s
How
to
Retire
to
Florida
(1947)

typified practical advice sought by millions. A. Lowell Hunt’s
Florida
Today:

New
Land
of
Opportunity
(1950) informed readers that “you don’t have to

Boom, Bust, and Uncertainty: A Social History of Modern Florida · 515

be rich” to retire to Florida, a message with an impact.8 The construction

industry boomed during the 1950s and 1960s, working overtime to pro-

vide tract houses and condominiums for new Floridians. Tin-can tourists

with travel-trailers hitched behind their cars had a postwar counterpart: the

mobile-home retirement vil age. Mobile homes were fast, easy, and cheap,

although rarely mobile. By 1980, Florida had more mobile homes than any

other state, and by the 1990s over 12 percent of Florida’s population resided

in 760,000 mobile homes. By 2010, the number of mobile homes had grown

to 840,000, but hurricanes, new safety standards, and disappearing trailer

parks have dulled their appeal.

A final aspect of Florida’s amenities can be found in sports and recre-

ation. In the late nineteenth century, fishing and hunting opportunities in

Florida attracted wealthy adventurers from the United States and Europe.

Al igator and bear hunting, camping and tarpon fishing formed the stuff

of such first-person accounts as James A. Henshal ’s
Camping
and
Cruising

in
Florida
(1884) and Charles E. Whitehead’s
The
Camp-Fires
of
the
Everglades,
or
Wild
Sports
in
the
South
(1891). Early-twentieth-century sporting activities became tamer—golf, tennis, polo, horse racing, yachting, and

other recreations that appealed initial y to the upper crust of Florida visi-

tors. Horseshoe pits and shuffleboard courts at city parks appealed across

proof

classes. By the late twentieth century, golf and tennis had become democ-

ratized and almost ubiquitous; virtual y every condominium and apart-

ment complex around the state had its own tennis courts and swimming

pools. Palm Beach County had more golf courses per capita than any other

county in the nation, a ranking chal enged by Lee and Col ier Counties.

But spectator sports now rival tennis and golf, suggesting that many Florid-

ians prefer their recreation in more sedentary forms. Modern Florida has

come to be defined by big-time college football (between 1980 and 2010, the

University of Miami, Florida State University, and the University of Florida