User:Sobesurfski
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I ride a surfski around Biscayne Bay near Miami Beach, Florida. The area is full of artificial islands and other signs of human development, and I have been very interested in where it all came from, why it's all there, and what effect it had on the bay that was there before people were here.
Floating around in the waters of the incomplete Isola di Lolando made me wonder what could have led to some real estate development company leaving such a huge and embarrassing failure just sitting there in the bay like that. I did some research and learned all about the South Florida Real Estate Bubble that led to the construction of the Venetian Islands. One of those islands, Belle Isle, is where I live now and I was curious about its history.
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[edit] Miami Beach history
I wrote Wikipedia articles on each of those things, with the photos from the Florida Photographic Collection. Bold-faced links on this page refer to articles that I originally wrote, and that the masses are now happily hacking away at. They tag and sort and classify and correct for grammar and add photos and links to other articles. They bicker and disagree and vandalize and I think it's all pretty neat. If you're a Wikipedia reader but you've never contributed, try it out it's easy. You don't have to write whole articles from scratch like I did, you just start by just correcting things that you know are wrong. Use references.
I also did articles on some of the other islands that I spend a lot of time on or in the waters around, like Flagler Monument Island which unbeknownst to me used to be perfectly round, and Biscayne Island. I found from photos that Biscayne Island used to be an air strip. Wow neat.
Other stuff from Miami's history has the same eerily familar yet totally different feel to it, too. Like take a look at what the port looked like when the Prinz Valdemar capsized in it, contributing to that unfinished island. Or take a look a the boat races they used to have for rich people where the Grand Flamingo is now, it used to be called the Flamingo Hotel. And there were flamboyant South Beach promoters in that era too, my favorite story involves Rosie the Elephant.
I've spent a little bit of time over the next few weeks polishing those articles up, with help. It's been amazing to watch readers make changes to the articles to improve them. They still left the dirty work to me though, I'm still cleaning up the format on the citations and verifying facts.
It seems like somebody in the future should be able to just type "concrete pilings in biscayne bay near miami beach" into Google and learn about it. Now they can. Did my part. Since it's hurricane season I might have plenty of time indoors to write more articles..
[edit] Welcome to swirly maps
On June 10, on the true start of the 2006 Atlantic hurricane season, I ended up indoors on a rainy day with my wife crashed on the couch in front of cooking shows. A rainy day that could last a week. A bunch of people were already working on that article on this season so I helped whip it into shape. It's natural after building software in teams. My mind tingled with the extreme coolness of Wikipedia as I watched that article iteratively improve every five minutes through a big group of interested people hacking on it. It's too bad that software projects can't move so quickly and feel so exciting.
Watching the article on Tropical Storm Alberto (2006) as it and the storm both formed at the same time was pretty cool. The Wikipedia articles on the storm season and on each storm seem to be even more useful than some of the other hurricane watching sites where I spend a lot of summer time. Wikipedia seems to have a much better signal-to-noise ratio than a web forum because the main article is supposed to be fact and not speculation.
[edit] Carl Fisher
Carl G. Fisher's story speaks to me like The Rum Diary used to. I have always known the name "Fisher" as the name of an island near Miami Beach that's reserved for the ultra-rich, but I didn't know anything about Fisher himself.
You can read the article (not one that I wrote) to learn all about the facts, but what's interesting to me about Fisher is that he was a true visionary entrepreneur. A guy you can really admire for flying so high, and then gawk at when he crashes into the ground at the end of his stunt. His whole life seems like one giant, wildly successful publicity stunt. He was a guy with the vision and talent necessary to dredge out a speed boat race track next to a mangrove-covered sand bar to create an A-list luxury resort destination in one of the most remote and uncomfortable places in the country. Nobody could understand what he saw in the place, his wife hated it, his nearest neighbor was an avocado farmer, but he had this vision in his head that exactly matches what he built and promoted over the next few years. The exotic and hedonistic spin that Fisher put on Miami's early marketing still defines the area eighty years later. How could such a talented guy lose it all so quickly when the markets collapsed?
Fisher was the original poster child for irrational exuberance. After the wave that he was riding crashed he was left with nothing. He drank himself to death, apparently lonely and broke. His wife had left him and he had no children, and he apparently had no close family. What would have happened if he had paused a moment after building Miami Beach to think about what to do next? What could he have contributed for our side during WWII if he had managed to stabilize his own life through the Great Depression? It's ironic that I ended up in this place, taking a sabbatical after stabilizing my life at the end of the Dot-com bubble, riding a kayak around and admiring Fisher's artificial islands. I really wish that it had all turned out better for him in the end.
[edit] Miami Terrace Reef
We have a reef in Miami? Huwhat?
That's what I was thinking when I read a Miami Herald article about a reef just off of Miami that runs from South Miami to Boca Raton. I did a bunch of Googling to learn more about it and took notes in a Wikipedia article about the Miami Terrace Reef.
