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.
Modern Miami wears all of it. PortMiami is the busiest cruise port in the world; the banks of Brickell face Latin America; the murals of Wynwood draw the art crowd north of downtown; and every November the snowbirds arrive on schedule, as they have since Flagler’s railroad first carried them. West of the city the Everglades begin, and offshore lies Biscayne National Park — manatees in the river channels, pelicans working the bay — the tropical frame around the only major mainland American city in the tropics.
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.