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.”
The water has defined the city ever since. Fort Lauderdale grew through a Second World War naval-air era and a postwar tourism boom into the place it is now: a major Atlantic beach destination, a great cruise port at Port Everglades, and a center of the yachting world, host to one of the largest boat shows anywhere. The New River still runs through downtown past the Riverwalk and Las Olas Boulevard, and the roughly 165 miles of canals that thread the city remain its signature — liquid streets that earned the Venice of America its name.
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.
