Miami, Florida - United States of America

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Jul 7, 2001

*City official name :Miami
*Founded date :
*Location :Florida State
*Elavation :? ft (? m)
*Area :Approximately ? square miles (? km²).
*Facts :Miami is a major city in southeastern Florida, in the United States. Miami and the surrounding metropolitan area are situated on northern Biscayne Bay between the Everglades and the Atlantic Ocean. By population, Miami is the largest city in Miami-Dade County and the county seat, the largest city in the South Florida metropolitan area, which comprises Miami-Dade County, Broward County, and Palm Beach County, making up the largest metropolitan area in the Southeastern United States and the sixth largest metropolitan area in the United States. However, based on city limits, it is the second-largest city in Florida (after Jacksonville).

Miami was officially incorporated as a city on July 28, 1896, with a voting population of just over 300. In 1940, 172,172 people lived in the city. According to the 2000 census, the city proper had a population of 362,470, while the larger metropolitan area had a population over 5.4 million. The U.S. Census Bureau estimate of the population of Miami in 2004 was 379,724.

Miami's explosive population growth in recent years has been driven by internal migration from other parts of the country as well as by immigration. Greater Miami is regarded as a cultural melting pot, heavily influenced both by its large population of ethnic Latin Americans and Caribbean islanders (many of them Spanish- or Haitian Creole-speaking).

The region's importance as an international financial and cultural center has elevated Miami to the status of world city; because of its cultural and linguistic ties to North, South, and Central America, and the Caribbean it is sometimes called "The Gateway of the Americas." Florida's large Spanish-speaking population and strong economic ties to Latin America also make Miami and the surrounding region an important center of the Hispanic world.

Practically all major foreign countries today maintain consulates in Miami. The city has been involved in numerous political controversies with nearby Cuba and Fidel Castro, plus wider concerns with terrorism, immigration, and drug issues throughout the region.

The earliest evidence of Native American settlement in the Miami region came from about 12,000 years ago. The first inhabitants settled on the banks of the Miami River, with the main villages on the northern banks.

The inhabitants at the time of first European contact were the Tequesta people, who controlled much of southeastern Florida, including what is now Miami-Dade County, Broward County, and the southern part of Palm Beach County. The Tequesta Indians fished, hunted, and gathered the fruit and roots of plants for food, but did not practice any form of agriculture. They buried the small bones of the deceased with the rest of the body, and put the larger bones in a box for the village people to see. The Tequesta are credited with making the Miami Circle.

Juan Ponce de León was the first European to visit the area in 1513 by sailing into Biscayne Bay. His journal records that he reached Chequescha, which was Miami's first recorded name. It is unknown whether he came ashore or made contact with the Indians. Pedro Menéndez de Avilés and his men made the first recorded landing when they visited the Tequesta settlement in 1566 while looking for Avilés' missing son, shipwrecked a year earlier. Spanish soldiers led by Father Francisco Villiareal built a Jesuit mission at the mouth of the Miami River a year later but it was short-lived. After the Spaniards left, the Tequesta Indians were left to fend themselves from European-introduced diseases like smallpox. By 1711, the Tequesta sent a couple of local chiefs to Havana, Cuba to ask if they could migrate there. The Cubans sent two ships to help them, but Spanish illnesses struck and most of the Indians died.

The first permanent European settlers arrived in the early 1800s. People came from the Bahamas to South Florida and the Keys to hunt for treasure from the ships that ran aground on the treacherous Great Florida reef. Some accepted Spanish land offers along the Miami River. At about the same time, the Seminole Indians arrived, along with a group of runaway slaves. The area was affected by the Second Seminole War, during which Major William S. Harney led several raids against the Indians. Most non-Indian residents were soldiers stationed at Fort Dallas. It was the most devastating Indian war in American history, causing almost a total loss of population in the Miami area.

After the Second Seminole War ended in 1842, William English, re-established a plantation started by his uncle on the Miami River. He charted the “Village of Miami” on the south bank of the Miami River and sold several plots of land. In 1844, Miami became the county seat, and six years later a census reported that there were ninety-six residents living in the area. The Third Seminole War (1855-1858) was not as destructive as the second one. Even so, it slowed down the settlement of southeast Florida. At the end of the war, a few of the soldiers stayed.

In 1891, a wealthy Cleveland, Ohio woman named Julia Tuttle purchased an enormous citrus plantation in the Miami area, augmenting a smaller plot of land she inherited from her father to make a total of 640 acres. Tuttle’s husband, Frederick Tuttle, died in 1886, and she decided to move to South Florida due to the “delicate health” of her children. She and William Brickell tried to get railroad magnate Henry Flagler to expand his rail line, the Florida East Coast Railroad, southward to the area, but he initially declined.

However, in the winter of 1894, Florida was struck by cold weather that destroyed virtually the entire citrus crop in the state. A few months later on the night of February 7, 1895, Florida was hit by another freeze. That freeze wiped out whatever crops survived the first one, and the new trees. Unlike the rest of the state, Miami was unaffected, and Tuttle's citrus became the only citrus on the market that year. Tuttle wrote to Flagler again, persuading him to visit the area and to see it for himself. Flagler did so, and concluded at the end of his first day that the area was ripe for expansion. He made the decision to extend his railroad to Miami and build a resort hotel.

On April 7, 1896 the railroad tracks finally reached Miami, and the first train arrived on April 13. It was a special, unscheduled train, and Flagler was on board. The train returned to St. Augustine later that night. The first regularly scheduled train arrived on the night of April 15.

On July 28, 1896, the incorporation meeting to make Miami a city took place. The right to vote was restricted to all men who resided in Miami or Dade County. After ensuring that the required number of voters was present, the motion was made to incorporate and organize a city government under the corporate name of “The City of Miami,” with the boundaries as proposed. and the city was incorporated with 444 citizens.

Miami's growth up to World War II was astronomical. In 1900, 1,681 people lived in Miami, Florida; in 1910, 5,471; in 1920, 29,571; in 1930, 110,637. As thousands of people moved to the area in the early 1900s, the need for more land quickly became apparent. Up until then, the Florida Everglades extended eastward to as close as three miles from Biscayne Bay. Beginning in 1906, canals were made to remove some of the water from those lands. During the early 1920s, the authorities of Miami allowed gambling and were very lax in regulating Prohibition, so thousands of people migrated from the northern United States to the Miami region. The catastrophic Great Miami Hurricane in 1926 caused 373 fatalities and ended a large building boom. Between 25,000 and 50,000 people were left homeless in the Miami area. The Great Depression followed, in which more than sixteen thousand people in Miami became unemployed.

On February 15, 1933, an assassination attempt was made on President-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt by Giuseppe Zangara, an Italian anarchist, while Roosevelt was giving a speech in Miami's Bayfront Park. Mayor Anton Cermak of Chicago, who was shaking hands with Roosevelt, was shot and died two weeks later. Four other people were wounded, but President-elect Roosevelt was not harmed.

By the early 1940s Miami was recovering from the Great Depression, but then World War II started. Many of the cities in Florida were heavily affected by the war and went into financial ruin, but Miami remained relatively unaffected. Over five hundred thousand enlisted men and fifty thousand officers trained in South Florida. After the end of the war, many servicemen and women returned to Miami, pushing the population up to almost a quarter million by 1950.

Following the 1959 revolution that unseated Fulgencio Batista and brought Fidel Castro to power, most Cubans who were living in Miami went back to Cuba. That soon changed, and many middle class and upper class Cubans moved to Florida en masse with little possessions after Castro began to curtail legal rights. Miami generally welcomed the Cuban exiles. In 1965 alone, 100,000 Cubans packed into the twice-daily "freedom flights" from Havana, Cuba to Miami. By the end of the 1960s, more than four hundred thousand Cuban refugees were living in Miami-Dade County.

Although Miami was not really considered a major center of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, it did not escape the change that occurred. Miami was a major city in the southern state of Florida, and had always had a substantial African-American and Caribbean population.

In December 1979, police officers pursued motorcyclist Arthur McDuffie in a high-speed chase after McDuffie made a provocative gesture towards a police officer. The officers claimed that the chase ended when McDuffie crashed his motorcycle and died. The coroner's report concluded otherwise. One of the officers testified that McDuffie fell off of his bike on an Interstate 95 on-ramp. When the police reached him he was injured but okay. The officers proceeded to remove his helmet, beat him to death with their batons, put his helmet back on, and called an ambulance claiming there had been a motorcycle accident. An all-white jury acquitted the officers after a brief deliberation. After learning of the verdict of the McDuffie case, one of the worst riots in the history of the United States, the infamous Liberty City Riots, broke out. By the time the rioting ceased three days later, over 850 people had been arrested, and at least eight white people and ten African Americans had died in the riots. Property damage was estimated around one hundred million dollars.

Later, the Mariel Boatlift of 1980 brought 150,000 Cubans to Miami, the largest in civilian history. Unlike the previous exodus of the 1960s, most of the Cuban refugees arriving were poor. Castro used the boatlift as a way of purging his country of criminals and of the mentally ill. During this time, many of the middle class non-Hispanic whites in the community left the city, often referred to as "white flight." In 1960, Miami was 90%!n(MISSING)on-Hispanic white; by 1990 it was less than 12%!n(MISSING)on-Hispanic white.

In the 1980s, Miami started to see an increase in immigrants from other nations such as Haiti. As the Haitian population grew, the area known today as Little Haiti emerged, centered around Northeast Second Avenue and 54th Street. In the 1990s, the presence of Haitians was acknowledged with Haitian Creole language signs in public places and ballots during voting.

Another major Cuban exodus occurred in 1994. To prevent it from becoming another Mariel Boatlift, the Clinton Administration announced a significant change in U.S. policy. In a controversial action, the administration announced that Cubans interdicted at sea would not be brought to the United States but instead would be taken by the Coast Guard to U.S. military installations at Guantanamo Bay or to Panama. During an eight-month period beginning in the summer of 1994, over 30,000 Cubans and more than 20,000 Haitians were interdicted and sent to live in camps outside the United States.

Hurricane Andrew caused more than $45 billion in damage just south of the Miami-Dade area in 1992.

The Elián González uproar was a heated custody and immigration battle in the Miami area in 2000. The contoversy concerned six-year-old Elián González, who was rescued from the waters off the coast of Miami. The U.S. and the Cuban governments, his father Juan Miguel González, his Miami relatives, and the Cuban-American community of Miami were involved. The climactic stage of this prolonged battle was the April 22, 2000 seizure of Elián by federal agents, which drew the criticism of many in the Cuban-American community.

The controversial Free Trade Area of the Americas negotiations occurred in 2003. It was a proposed agreement to reduce trade barriers while increasing intellectual property rights. During the 2003 meeting in Miami, the Free Trade Area of the Americas was met by heavy opposition from anti-corporatization and anti-globalization protests.

On July 27, 2005, the popular ex-city commissioner Arthur Teele walked into the main lobby of the Miami Herald headquarters, dropped off a package for columnist Jim DeFede, and told the security guard to tell his wife Stephanie he "loved her" before pulling out a gun and committing suicide.

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Miami, Florida - United States of America

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Miami, Florida - United States of America

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Miami, Florida - United States of America

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Miami, Florida - United States of America

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Miami, Florida - United States of America

Miami
Miami, Florida - United States of America

Miami
Miami, Florida - United States of America

Miami
Miami, Florida - United States of America