This emphasis on selling an image, promoting development, and encouraging  land speculation, fostered the creation of today's South Florida landscape. In order for permanent settlement and growth to take place, the natural resources that first attracted newcomers were sacrificed, with results that would only be understood much later. The draining of the Everglades, for example, fundamentally altered the landscape and ecosystem of the region.

Only recently, with mounting awareness of environmental issues, have local and federal agencies committed themselves to trying to restore the Everglades and reconnect the region to the natural environment that contributes to its unique physical features. Metropolitan Miami, then, with its history of unplanned growth and urban sprawl, reflects broader trends in urban development in the last century- particularly in sunbelt tourist cities like Phoenix--that environmentalists, planners, and developers are now confronting.

The expansion of travel and tourism have been been the driving engines of growth in Miami. The first non-indigenous settlers to arrive in “Cocoanut Grove” (the spelling was changed to “Coconut” in 1919), the oldest section of what would become Miami, were fishermen from the Bahamas, who were soon joined in the 1870s and 1880s by industrialists from the north. Ralph Munroe, a sailing enthusiast from Staten Island, first came to South Florida in 1877, calling the area a “sailor’s paradise.”  Munroe fought hard to preserve the features of the natural environment that first brought him to South Florida, and often found himself at odds with local boosters intent on promoting growth.

In 1884 Munroe’s friends Charles and Isabella Peacock built a hotel on the bayfront that became known as the Peacock Inn. Soon tourists began arriving to see for themselves the tropical splendor of Biscayne Bay and the lure of cheap land for cultivation. Black Bahamians worked at the Peacock Inn and also served as laborers who planted the tropical groves established by the influx of migrating northerners eager to capitalize on this as yet untapped source of wealth. By the time Henry Flagler's railroad reached Miami in 1896, local boosters spoke of the "coming metropolis of South Florida." The early settlers, including the Tuttles, Brickells, and Peacocks, who developed trade with the Seminoles and confronted a largely untamed tropical landscape, now shaped the rapid transformation of this frontier into a budding metropolis based on luring travelers and potential land buyers to South Florida.