| Tourism |
| Year | Month | Day | Event | Related
Resource |
| 1825 | December | 17 | The Cape Florida Lighthouse was completed. The site was the southern tip of Key Biscayne. | display |
| 1894 | February | 11 | Henry Flagler's Royal Poinciana Hotel opened in Palm Beach. | display |
April | 02 | Henry Flagler's railroad reached Palm Beach. | | | 1897 | January | 16 | The Hotel Royal Palm opened for business fifteen days behind schedule. Henry Flagler built the hotel at a cost of $750,000 to draw passengers onto his new railroad line extending to Miami. The hotel stood until 1931. | display |
| 1903 | | | The Army Corps of Engineers began dredging the first opening to the Atlantic Ocean, cutting through mangrove swamps at Government Cut. The project allowed for safer, more direct access to the port of Miami. | |
| 1905 | | | Henry Flagler decided to extend his Florida East Coast Railway further south, from Biscayne Bay in Miami to Key West. | |
| 1906 | January | 20 | The Halcyon Hall Hotel opened in Miami on the later site of the Dupont building. | display |
| 1913 | | | Joe Weiss, a Jewish waiter from New York, arrived in Miami and opened a lunch stand at Smith's Casino on in Miami Beach. In 1920, he and his wife, Jennie, opened their own restaurant called Joe's on the tip of Miami Beach that specialized in seafood and, eventually, Stone crab. | |
| 1914 | | | The W.J. Brown Hotel opened on Miami Beach. It was the first hotel to open on the island. | |
| | Collins Avenue, the first paved road on Miami Beach, opened. It was the first road on the island suitable for automobiles. | display | | 1915 | | | J.N. and J.E. Lummus sold some of their oceanfront property to Miami Beach for $40,000. To be named Lummus Park, the land was dedicated as both a public park and beach. | |
| | Carl Fisher cleared Lincoln Road. | display | January | 01 | The Miami Chamber of Commerce was founded. | display | | 1920 | | | Carl Fisher's Roman Pools and Casino open at 22nd Street and the Ocean. | display |
| | Carl Fisher's Miami Beach Railway Company helped to link Miami and Miami Beach. A single line connecting downtown and south Miami Beach ran via the County Causeway. | | December | 31 | The Flamingo Hotel opened at 15th Street and the Bay on New Year's Eve. | display | | 1921 | November | 27 | The first lots were sold in Coral Gables. Conceptualized by George Edgar Merrick, the city began with the Merrick family grove and a Mediterranean architectural style. By 1926, the city covered 10,000 acres and had netted $150 million in sales with over $100 million spent on development. | display |
| 1922 | | | The Bayshore Golf Course is completed. | display |
| 1924 | | | The LaGorce Golf Course is completed. Fisher names it after his friend, Rockwell LaGorce. | display |
January | 10 | The Nautilus Hotel opened for business on the present site of the Mount Sinai Hospital. | display | | 1925 | | | The Kelly Air Mail Act of 1925 made possible the growth of commercial aviation in Miami and South Florida. | |
| | The Floridian Hotel was built. | display | February | 18 | The Olympia Theater opened. It was the first building in Miami to be air conditioned. The theater hosted a variety of acts, but its specialty was the vaudeville show. It drew large crowds through the 1950s, but later faced demolition until being purchased by Maurice Gusman in 1971. | display | | 1926 | January | | The Roney Plaza Hotel was completed and opened for business. | display |
January | | The Biltmore Hotel was completed after ten months of construction for a cost of $10 million. | display | February | 28 | Venetian Way (now called the Venetian Causeway) opened to traffic. It was built over what had been the route for the Collins Bridge. | display | | 1927 | | | The Million Dollar Pier is completed at the southern tip of Miami Beach. | display |
| | The Kennel Club opens at the southern tip of Miami Beach. | display | July | 28 | The Greater Miami Airport Association was created. | | | 1928 | January | 04 | The first nonstop flight from Miami to New York took place. | |
January | 16 | The first scheduled passender flight from south Florida to Cuba took place. It was a Pan American Airways flight from Key West to Havana. | | September | 15 | Pan American Airways established its base of operations in Miami. It had previously been in Key West. | | | 1929 | | | The city of Miami Beach acquires Flamingo Park and dedicates it as a public facility. | |
| | The North Bay Causeway opened. It linked Miami Beach with the mainland at what is today Seventy-ninth Street. The intersection at Seventy-ninth and Biscayne Boulevard subsequently gained importance, and as Miami emerged from the Great Depression and later World War II, it and its outlying areas experienced a period of intense development. Many of the buildings near this intersection built in the 1950s and 1960s were designed along classic Modernist lines. | | | 1930 | | | The Boulevard Shops on Biscayne Boulevard were built. One block away from Miami's first Art Deco building - the Sears Roebuck store - this group of upscale retail shops was another fine example of this type of architectural design. They were designed by Robert Law Weed. | |
January | 13 | The Miami Civic Center opened on Biscayne Boulevard. It was later renamed the Mayfair Art Theater. | | | 1931 | | | Colonel Henry L. Doherty purchased the Miami-Biltmore, the Roney Plaza, and the Key Largo Angler's Club. In doing so, he formed the Florida Year Round Club. This move aimed to counteract the negative impacts of the Great Depression and establish Miami and Miami Beach as year-round tourist destinations. | |
| 1933 | January | 01 | Miami hosted its first Orange Bowl, even though it was not referred to as such. The University of Miami and Manhattan College played in "The First Annual New Year's Day Football Classic," which was held at Moore Park. | display |
| 1934 | | | The Everglades National Park was created. Congress authorized 2,164,480 acres to be acquired for the park through public and private donations. Some of the largest landowners in the Everglades sought a minimun price for their land. The price of $5.00 per acre was chosen. | display |
| 1935 | | | The Miami area began to emerge from the Great Depression. The recovery in South Florida preceded that which occurred in other cities. By the mid-1930s, a string of new hotels built in the Art Deco style began to rise from the ruin caused by not only the Depression, but the hurricane of 1926. | |
| 1936 | December | 20 | Parrot Jungle Island opened. Started by Franz Scherr and originally located on Red Road, one hundred visitors paid twenty-five cents admission to see twenty-five birds and the flora and fauna of his park on this first day. Today, Parrot Jungle is home to over one thousand birds and has moved to a site along the MacArthur Causeway between Miami and Miami Beach. The original grounds on Red Road remain, and the park has renamed as Pinecrest Gardens. | |
| 1938 | March | 23 | Fairchild Tropical Garden was dedicated. In 1935, Colonel Robert M. Montgomery and his wife Nell Foster Montgomery had purchased eighty acres and founded a public botanical garden, setting the stage for the establishment of the tropical garden that still exists today. | |
| 1939 | | | The Clevelander Hotel opened at 10th and Ocean Drive. | |
| 1940 | | | The Deco Grossinger Beach Hotel opened. Later to be called the Ritz Plaza Hotel, it was designed by L. Murray Dixon in classic Art Deco style. Seven years later, the Delano Hotel opened directly across the street. | |
| 1947 | | | The Everglades National Park was dedicated. President Harry Truman was there for the dedication. | |
| 1948 | | | The Saxony Hotel opened in Miami Beach. It was designed by Roy France, who also designed the National Hotel of 1940. The Modernist Saxony was part of a new generation of hotels built in Miami and Miami Beach. It and many of the other new buildings lacked the ornamental Art Deco motifs that were to be seen for the last times in the designs of the Sherry Frontenac and the Delano hotels. | display |
| 1949 | | | The Casablanca Hotel opened. Roy France designed the hotel, which was named after the famous film staring Humphrey Bogart. The hotel can be described as Modernist in its design, but it also incorporated elements of the International Style and Hollywood-themed kitsch. The latter of these came to influence the way developers in Las Vegas, Nevada designed their resorts decades later. | display |
| 1951 | | | The Bombay Hotel opened. The hotel's name was later changed to the Golden Sands Hotel. It was the first hotel in Miami Beach to offer its guests a parking garage. Norman M. Giller designed the building. On why his was the first hotel to have a garage, Giller said that, "in the Art Deco days we were in a Depression, so nobody was thinking about cars, because not too many people had them." | |
| 1953 | | | The Lido Spa opened on Belle Isle along the Venetian Causeway. | |
| 1972 | | | The Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 was passed. It was aimed at protecting all marine life, specifically Florida's manatees. | display |
| 1979 | | | The Everglades were designated as a World Heritage Site by the United Nations. | display |
| 1980 | | | Biscayne Bay National Park was established. As the status was changed from a national monument to a national park, Congress authorized the acquisition of new keys and reefs in the bay. | display |
July | 07 | The Metrozoo opened. This first section was twenty-five acres. | display | | 1988 | February | 01 | The American Airlines Arena was built with dredging from the bay. | |
| 1989 | | | The Everglades National Park Protection and Expansion Act of 1989 was passed. The act authorized the Army Corps of Engineers to restore, as much as possible, the park's natural hydrological conditions, and the purchase of 107,000 additional acres of land to increase water flow on the park's eastern side. | |
| 1994 | | | The Everglades Forever Act was passed. Passed by Florida's state legislature, this act underwrote $685 million for construction, land acquisition, and water treatment. $320 million was to come from sugar farmers to clean up farm runoff, and the rest was to come from taxpayers. | display |
| 2000 | | | Miami Beach was named the #1 Urban Beach by the Surfrider Foundation. | |
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