Great Depression
YearMonthDayEvent Related
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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. 
1933February15President-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt visited Miami, and was greated by 18,000 Miamians at the Bayfront Park bandshell. 
March04Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office as President of the United States. Shortly thereafter, 16,000 Miamians received direct financial assistance from one of his "alphabet soup agencies" - the Federal Emergency Relief Agency (FERA). The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) also went to work in Miami in the months that followed. 
1935  The Public Works Administration (PWA) began operating in Miami. As a result, buildings such as the Miami Beach post office, the Miami Shores golf club, the Coral Gables fire station, a hospital building, and others were constructed by thousands of unemployed workers. 
  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. 
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." 
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