The Florida Land Boom of the 1920s

The Florida land boom was the rush of land development and sales after World War I, when profits and prices for many developers reached inflated levels, until the bubble burst in 1926, the Florida Department of State says (Florida Department of State; Department of State).

With more Americans owning automobiles, a Florida vacation became commonplace, many visitors stayed on, and exotic projects sprang up in southern Florida; some people moved onto land made from drained swamps, others bought canal-crossed tracts, and land in Florida was sold and resold (Department of State).

South Florida shows the scale. The National Weather Service office in Miami writes that by September 1926 Dade County and the young City of Miami had grown to well over 100,000 people, against a 1920 census figure of 42,753, and that construction was everywhere (National Weather Service Miami).

Last verified: October 18, 2026, by reading ten Division of Historical Resources boom markers from Jacksonville to Coral Gables one at a time, together with two Department of State history pages and the Weather Service's 1926 hurricane memorial.

The boom built planned suburbs, resort hotels, a golf club and a civic monument from Jacksonville to Coral Gables, and the Division of Historical Resources has marked many of them (Division of Historical Resources).

The marker for St. Petersburg's Soreno Hotel (its title spells the name Sereno) says construction began in 1923, the majority of rooms were leased before the 1924 tourist season, and it was the first of ten grand hotels built between 1923 and 1926 that defined the city as a winter destination (Sereno Hotel marker).

In Jacksonville, the 1921 opening of the St. Johns River Bridge made South Jacksonville attractive to developers, and Telfair Stockton began San Marco in 1925 (San Marco marker). Near Orlando, the name Orwin Manor joined Orlando and Winter Park, because parts of the subdivision lie in each city (Orwin Manor marker). North of Miami, the Shoreland Company developed Miami Shores and extended Biscayne Boulevard from the new subdivision to downtown Miami (Miami Shore Village marker).

In Citrus County the Florida West Coast Development Company bought several thousand acres in 1924 for a City Beautiful plan with streets 80 to 100 feet wide and nine foot sidewalks (Florida Boom Sidewalk marker). In Stuart, a Mediterranean Revival arch finished on February 20, 1926 marked the creation of Martin County, with Stuart as county seat (Stuart Welcome Arch marker).

Developers sold the boom with a look: state markers name Mediterranean Revival architecture and City Beautiful planning again and again, from Miami Shores and Stuart to San Marco and Homosassa (Miami Shore Village marker; San Marco marker).

Some companies wrote the style into the rules. The Shoreland Company specified Mediterranean Revival homes in Miami Shores to fit a theme it called America's Mediterranean, and named the development after a 1919 waltz, On Miami Shore (Miami Shore Village marker). In Boca Raton, Old Floresta keeps the Spanish-style architecture of rough-finished stucco walls, wrought iron balconies and barrel tile roofs that the marker credits to the subdivision since the 1920s (Old Floresta marker).

Planning ideas traveled too. San Marco's winding streets, planted medians and parks reflect the City Beautiful movement rather than the older grid, and its business square was inspired by the Piazza San Marco in Venice (San Marco marker). In Coral Gables, the Alhambra Water Tower of about 1923, whose design is credited to Denman Fink, encloses a steel tank in a wood frame and reinforced concrete structure made to resemble a lighthouse (Alhambra Water Tower marker).

Speed showed in the sales. San Marco lots sold in a frenzy of speculation during September 1925, before the streets were paved and before a muddy former brickyard claypit became Lake Marco, the Jacksonville marker says (San Marco marker).

The boom ended in 1926, when money and credit ran out and banks and investors abruptly stopped trusting the paper millionaires, and the 1926 and 1928 hurricanes deepened the slump, according to the Florida Department of State (Florida Department of State).

The Department of State adds that by the time the nationwide economic collapse began in 1929, Floridians were already used to hard times, and that the same year the Mediterranean fruit fly invaded, bringing a citrus quarantine with roadblocks and a cut in production of about sixty percent (Department of State).

The first of those storms struck the heart of the boom. The National Weather Service describes the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 as a category 4 storm for which no warnings had been issued as late as the morning of September 17, when warnings were still sent out from Washington, less than a day before its effects began; the Red Cross later reported 372 deaths and more than 6,000 injuries, and damage was estimated at $105 million in 1926 dollars (National Weather Service Miami). The storm made a second Florida landfall near Pensacola on September 20 (National Weather Service).

Many boom companies failed, and their projects were finished by lenders, taken over by successors or never built at all, state markers record (Old Floresta marker; Miami Shore Village marker; Florida Boom Sidewalk marker).

In Boca Raton the Mizner Development Corporation collapsed with the end of the boom in 1926, before its builder could finish 29 houses; the Chicago partners who held the mortgage filed for foreclosure, and their leader supervised completion of the houses and suggested the name Floresta (Old Floresta marker). The Shoreland Company declared bankruptcy in 1927, Bessemer Properties took over its holdings in 1928, and the State of Florida incorporated Miami Shores Village on January 2, 1932 (Miami Shore Village marker).

Some plans simply stopped. New Homosassa's plans for plazas, a golf course and three country clubs were abandoned after the boom went bust in 1926, and only two commercial buildings and a few homes were built (Florida Boom Sidewalk marker). The Dunedin Isles Golf Club fell on hard times in the nationwide slump and was deeded to the City of Dunedin in 1938 (Dunedin Isles Golf Club marker).

A few projects outlasted the crash. The Don Ce Sar Hotel near Passe-a-Grille Beach in Pinellas County, conceived by developer Thomas J. Rowe in the mid 1920s, was finished in 1928 after the boom had ended and stayed open through the hard years of the 1930s (Don Ce Sar Hotel marker).

Boom-era places survive across Florida as historic districts, restored landmarks and parks, and each of the sites below carries a state historical marker (Division of Historical Resources).

Old Floresta became Boca Raton's first historic district in 1990 (Old Floresta marker). The Don Ce Sar was restored, reopened in 1973 and placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975 (Don Ce Sar marker). Coral Gables restored the Alhambra Water Tower in 1993 from 1924 photographs, after buying it for a token sum in 1958 (Alhambra Water Tower marker). San Marco Square keeps the St. Mark's Building of 1927 with its arched facade and tile roof (San Marco marker).

Smaller traces count too. A stretch of the original nine foot sidewalk survives at Aquaduct Street and South Pittsburg Avenue in Homosassa Springs (Florida Boom Sidewalk marker). Stuart's 1926 welcome arch is known today as the Rio-Jensen Arch, and its restoration is a goal of a Martin County redevelopment plan adopted in April 2001 (Stuart Welcome Arch marker). The Orwin Manor sales office was demolished in the late 1950s, and Winter Park dedicated The Park at Orwin Manor on its site in September 1994 (Orwin Manor marker). Not everything survived: the Soreno Hotel closed in 1984 and was demolished in 1992 (Sereno Hotel marker).