What’s with the Orange Blossom? In the winter of 1894-95 the Great Freeze killed the citrus belt across central and northern Florida — and spared the wilderness at the mouth of the Miami River. Julia Tuttle, a Cleveland widow who had bought 640 acres at the old Fort Dallas military site, had spent years trying to convince the railroad baron Henry Flagler to extend his Florida East Coast Railway south to the shore she could see from her porch. Now she made sure proof reached him: the man Flagler sent south to investigate carried back an orange blossom, fresh and unfrozen, from her side of the freeze line — along with her offer of half her land for the railroad. The order to extend the tracks came. On April 22, 1896, the first scheduled passenger train rolled in to the Miami River, and on July 28, 1896, 502 voters met in a downtown pool hall and incorporated the City of Miami — making Julia Tuttle the only woman ever to have founded a major American city, in an era when she could not cast a vote in that pool hall herself. Flagler’s Royal Palm Hotel opened at the river’s mouth the following January, and the town grew so fast that visitors said it rose like magic. The nickname stuck: the Magic City.
The city’s second founding came by sea and by air. After the Cuban Revolution of 1959, waves of exiles remade Miami across the decades, and the Freedom Tower — the old newspaper tower of 1925 — served from 1962 to 1974 as the Cuban Refugee Center, the "Ellis Island of the South," where hundreds of thousands of arrivals were processed into new American lives. Little Havana grew around Calle Ocho: the ventanitas passing cafecito across the counter, croquetas and pastelitos in the bakery cases, guayaberas on Sunday, dominoes clacking at Máximo Gómez Park. Little Haiti added its own quarter to the north, and Hialeah, just beyond the city line, grew into the Cuban-American heartland of the metro. Overtown, the historic heart of Black Miami once called the Harlem of the South, kept its own stage lights burning at the Lyric Theater. Miami became a city that lives in Spanish and a dozen other languages at once — the gateway to Latin America, facing south and belonging to both hemispheres.
Why People Visit Miami Florida
Miami offers a founding story with an orange blossom at its center, a refugee tower that welcomed the community that remade the city, cafecito through walk-up windows, boom-era Mediterranean fantasies, and tropical light on Biscayne Bay. Visitors come for Little Havana, the Deco-era heritage, the bay, the Everglades at the back door, and the winter that made the city famous. Magic City since 1896.