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The late Daniel Boorstin, an eminent historian and onetime Librarian of the U.S. Congress, wrote of “booster cities” in The Americans: The Democratic Experience. Boorstin explained that these settlements had recently come together as communities and were proud of their progress, which they wished to share and showcase with anyone who would listen. Surely, the nascent city of Miami can be placed in that category following its rise as a tiny settlement along both banks of the Miami River in 1895 to an incorporated city of many hundreds following the entry of Henry M. Flagler’s Florida East Coast Railway the next year.
The city proudly displayed its new-found status during its first Christmas. That observance and celebration, chronicled in my previous article, consisted of many different events, including a Christmas-night fireworks display by joyous Miamians in blissful ignorance of a municipal ordinance prohibiting that activity within the city limits. Even worse, many revelers threw fireworks under buildings in the business district and elsewhere.
In the early morning hours of December 26, with most celebrants sound asleep, a fire broke out at E.L. Brady’s store, a purveyor of groceries, grain, hay and garden seed, located on the northwest corner of Avenue D and 14th Street, today’s South Miami Avenue and Second Street. The Miami Metropolis, the city’s lone newspaper, believed that the fire resulted from the recent detonation of fireworks.
J.L. Phinazee, a restaurateur, was returning from a meat market at 4:00 a.m., presumably after purchasing cuts for the day ahead, when he saw flames outside of Brady’s store. Phinazee sounded an alarm as the flames spread quickly from Brady’s store, engulfing the nearby Bank of Bay Biscayne building before spreading to Captain E.H. Chase’s pool hall and beyond. One and one-half hours after the alarm was sounded, twenty-eight buildings lay in ruin. A stiff wind blowing in from the east spread the flames “with a fury scarcely ever witnessed in a fire.”
The entire block on both sides of today’s South Miami Avenue between First and Second Streets had been destroyed by fire. In all, three blocks of buildings in the district were gone. Several other structures were damaged, though the building housing the Metropolis, situated one block south of Brady’s store, was spared.
Julius Franks, a clothier operating in partnership with Isidor Cohen, the city’s earliest Jewish settler, was the lone fatality, losing his life while he and Cohen were removing clothing from a building on First Street. The fatality was the result of an explosion in the bottling plant of Alois Zapf, in the rear of Frank’s building. The deadly missile struck Frank in the abdomen, causing him to lose consciousness immediately. He died soon after.
The twenty-eight buildings destroyed by the flames were, in the estimation of the Metropolis, comprised “all of wood and nearly all cheaply built…All were put up hurriedly within thirty days after the railroad to Miami was completed in April. There was not a foot of vacant space throughout the territory burned. The buildings all went like kindling wood. A few scraps of iron, a few brick foundation pillars, two heaps of mortar from the only two plastered buildings in the burned territory, a few tin cans and piles of broken crockery now comprise all that remains of the twenty-eight business houses.”
In the next installment of this column, we will complete our examination of this disastrous fire, which was followed by the rapid rebuilding of the business district. In the years that followed, the young city faced additional challenges, which it again surmounted as it entered the twentieth century.
Paul S. George, Ph.D., serves as Resident Historian, HistoryMiami Museum. He conducts history tours throughout the County and even beyond for HistoryMiami. Additionally, he teaches classes in Miami/S. Florida and Florida history for the Museum. Dr. George has also led, since 2002, tours of Little Havana as part of Viernes Culturales, a monthly celebration, every third Friday, of the culture and history of that quarter.
