Miami, Florida

Miami is a city located in southeast Florida in Miami-Dade County on the Miami River, between the Florida Everglades and the Atlantic Ocean.

It is the county seat and largest city in Miami-Dade County (est. 2000 population: 2,253,362). As of the 2000 census, the city proper had a total population of 362,470.

Although the city itself is not large, the metropolis of Miami comprises many small surrounding towns and cities, which effectively form one giant urban mass. Such cities include Miami Beach, Bal Harbour, North Bay Village, Sunny Isles, North Miami Beach, Aventura, North Miami, Opa-Locka, Carol City, Miami Lakes, Hialeah, Medley, Miami Springs, Westchester, West Miami, Kendall, Pinecrest, Key Biscayne, Coconut Grove, Coral Gables, Sweetwater, and Homestead.

Greater Miami is a vibrant area established during the 1890s. Today Miami-Dade County has over 2.2 million inhabitants, and neighboring Broward and Palm Beach Counties to the north have 1.6 and 1.1 million respectively. Miami is considered a cultural melting pot due to the large Latin American population. Among Miamians are Cubans, Nicaraguans, Colombians, Venezuelans, Puerto Ricans, Argentinians, Ecuadorian, Brazilians, Dominicans, Haitians and Mexicans.

Table of contents

1 Geography 2 History 2.1 Early history 2.2 American settlement 2.3 Early growth 2.4 Immigration 2.5 Miami Vice 3 Economy 4 Transportation 5 Demographics 6 Colleges and universities 7 Sports teams 8 Miami in television and film 9 External links

Geography

Miami is located at 25°47'16" North, 80°13'27" West (25.787676, -80.224145)¹.

According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 143.1 km² (55.3 mi²). 92.4 km² (35.7 mi²) of it is land and 50.7 km² (19.6 mi²) of it is water. The total area is 35.44% water.

History

Early history

The name "Miami" comes from a Native American word for "sweet water". The area was a concentration of water because the Miami River is essentially a funnel for water from the Everglades to the Atlantic Ocean.

Native Americans are known to have settled in the Miami region for about 10,000 years. Its most noteworthy early inhabitants were the Tequesta people, who controlled an empire covering most of South Florida.

Although Ponce de Leon attempted to settle the area in the early 1500's, his men could not defend the territory against the natives, so they kept to the more sparsely populated north. For most of the colonial period, Miami was only briefly visited by traveling Europeans when it was visited at all.

American settlement

Miami was still largely uninhabited in the late 1800's, even following the final defeat of the natives in 1857. Then, in 1891, a woman named Julia Tuttle purchased an enormous citrus plantation in the area. She initially pressured railroad magnate Henry Flagler to build a line to the settlement.

In 1894, however, Florida was struck by a terrible winter that destroyed virtually all of the citrus crop in the northern half of the state. Miami, however, was unaffected, and Tuttle's citrus became the only citrus on the market that year. She wrote to Flagler again, persuading him to visit the area and see it for himself: he did so, and concluded at the end of his first day that the area was ripe for expansion.

On July 28, 1896, the City of Miami was incorporated with 344 citizens.

Early growth

Miami's growth up to World War II was astronomical:

1900: 4,955
1910: 11,933
1920: 42,753
1930: 142,955
1940: 267,739

During the early 1920's, the authorities in Miami allowed gambling and were very lax in regulating Prohibition, and so thousands of people migrated from the northern United States to the Miami region, creating a construction boom and building a skyline of high-rise buildings where none had existed before. Some early developments had to be razed ten years after their initial construction to make way for even larger buildings. A catastrophic hurricane in 1927, followed by the Great Depression, ended this boom.

In the mid-1930's, the Art Deco district of Miami Beach was developed.

During World War II, the U.S. government constructed many training, supply, and communications facilities around Miami, taking advantage of its strategic location at the southeastern corner of the country. Many servicemen and women returned to Miami after the war, pushing the population up to half a million by 1950.

Immigration

The 1950's saw Miami transformed by its neighbor to the south, Cuba. Mobsters were drawn to the city because of its proximity to the organized crime paradise of Batista-era Havana.

Following the 1959 coup that unseated Batista and brought Fidel Castro to power, Cuban refugees began travelling to Florida en masse. In 1965 alone, 100,000 Cubans packed into the twice-daily "freedom flights" between Havana and Miami. Later, the Mariel Boatlift brought 150,000 Cubans to Miami in a single flotilla, the largest in civilian history.

The city, for the most part, welcomed the Cuban refugees. Little Havana emerged as a predominantly Spanish-speaking community, and Spanish speakers elsewhere in the city could conduct most of their daily business in their native tongue.

The Cuban inflow slowed down in the 1980's, and was largely