Fort Lauderdale incorporated as a city on March 27, 1911, a small riverfront town of a few hundred people. What transformed it came in the 1920s, when developers dredged the low, wet land behind the beach into a lattice of canals and finger islands, selling waterfront lots where there had been mangrove and marsh. The dredging gave the city its identity and its nickname — the “Venice of America,” a place where the streets were matched by water and nearly every house could keep a boat at its back door. The 1926 hurricane and the collapse of the Florida land boom ended the frenzy, but the canals remained.
Long before the forts, the New River belonged to the Tequesta, who lived along its banks for more than a thousand years before European contact; by 1763, after generations of disease introduced by the Spanish, only a few remained. In the early nineteenth century the Seminole lived and farmed in the region, and it was to seize that ground, during a war of removal, that the army built the New River forts in 1838. The conflict and the forts passed, but the river stayed — a dark, winding tidal channel running out of the Everglades to the sea, the feature around which everything here would eventually be built.
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.
