The modern city begins with a trading post. In 1893 Frank Stranahan arrived at the New River, ran a ferry across it, and opened a trading post that did business with the Seminole and served as post office and community hall for the handful of settlers nearby. When the Florida East Coast Railway reached the river in 1896, the settlement had a future. In 1901 Stranahan built the house that still stands on the river at Las Olas — the Stranahan House, the oldest surviving building in Broward County. His wife, Ivy Cromartie Stranahan, had become the area's first schoolteacher in 1899 and spent her long life as an advocate for the Seminole; she is remembered as the “Mother of Fort Lauderdale.”
Today Fort Lauderdale is the Venice of America — a city of canals and yachts, a great beach and a busy river, with a frontier fort and a trading post somewhere underneath it all. Its story runs from a Tequesta river and an 1838 Seminole-War fort, through Frank Stranahan's 1893 trading post and the 1920s canal boom, to the yachting and cruise capital it is now. Our Fort Lauderdale designs gather that identity into wearable form — the alligator emblem, the New River, and the canals. Fort Lauderdale, Florida: the Venice of America, on the New River where the city began.
Why People Visit Fort Lauderdale
Fort Lauderdale offers South Florida at its most nautical — a real beach city laced with canals, with a historic river downtown, a great cruise port, and the yachting world's calendar built around it. Visitors come for the water, the beaches, and the Venice-of-America canals, and stay for Las Olas, the Riverwalk, and the easy coastal pace. From the New River to the sand, it rewards a day or a week. It is bright, nautical, and genuinely South Florida.
