The Key West Connection

LXXXVII

One of Pan American's earliest Fokker Clippers lifting off in poor weather from Meacham Field, Key West, Florida in October 1927

One of the last Pan Am flights, a local shuttle "Express," lifted off from Key West in December 1991.  Of the “Pan Am Express” planes, only the first, Clipper Commodore, had a name. It was not a good omen for the airline

The name "Rockefeller" is synonymous with wealth and power. Juan Trippe knew this as well as anyone, and he invited a Rockefeller to invest in Pan American Airways. This same Rockefeller (William) was a member of Pan Am’s original Board of Directors. 

John D. Rockefeller, the nineteenth century paterfamilias of the clan, rose from obscure grain merchant to the head of the mightiest of American corporations, Standard Oil (today's Exxon Mobil). Although John D. Rockefeller was the public face of Standard Oil, Rockefeller had a partner who kept the books and managed the backroom deals, and may, in fact, have been more responsible for Standard Oil's financial success than Rockefeller himself. He was named Henry Morison Flagler, hardly a household word, hardly even in South Florida, but he created the conditions that allowed Pan American Airways to thrive.

 

John D. Rockefeller, the Master of Standard Oil

Henry Morison Flagler was Rockefeller's partner in Standard Oil, and was the true businessman of the pair. He was a cutthroat henchman who acted as a lightning rod for Standard Oil's perceived evils

When Flagler came to Florida he fell in love with the State. He built The Breakers in Palm Beach as a hotel for his visiting friends

By the time Flagler was fifty five he was one of the wealthiest men in the world. He had a deserved reputation as a cutthroat robber baron, and had been investigated by Congress and denigrated in the press for his greed. Yet, at fifty five, the trajectory of Henry Flagler's life changed completely. In an attempt to ease his first wife's chronic asthma, he left his sprawling Westchester County, New York estate, (bizarrely called "Satan's Toe"), and came to St. Augustine, Florida, America's oldest city, where the perpetual summer of Florida eased Mrs. Flagler’s breathing. It was when Flagler saw his first palm tree that the stoic business tycoon's heart thawed. He fell in love with Florida passionately, the way some men fall in love with women. He built a house in St. Augustine, laid a railroad, and then built a resort hotel for his friends and associates so they too could enjoy Florida. Captivated by the countryside, Flagler traveled down the coast until he found what he deemed to be paradise --- and in his own private Xanadu this Kublai Khan a stately pleasure dome decreed.

Worth Avenue in Palm Beach is a street of exclusive shops. Cartier started out making timepieces for pilots

 

That pleasure dome still stands. It is called Palm Beach, now one of the wealthiest cities in America. And here too, Flagler stretched the railroad and built a resort hotel, the massive Breakers, still one of the nation's most imposing hotels.

West Palm Beach, the poorer relation, seen across Lake Worth, circa 2016

When Flagler built Palm Beach he also created the class structure of Florida. The rough service camp of the workers who actually built Palm Beach lay 500 yards across Lake Worth. It later became known as West Palm Beach. Until the year 2000, West Palm Beach was the exact opposite of glittering Palm Beach. West Palm Beach was a ramshackle city hardly fit to be the County Seat of the largest and wealthiest of Florida's 67 counties. In 2000, a local West Palm Beach judge, later known ruefully as "Hanging Chad," gave the Presidential election to George W. Bush, who rewarded West Palm Beach with a blank check for urban renewal. The shanties along the railroad tracks vanished, and a city of boutique shops, fine restaurants, and recreation venues replaced them seemingly overnight, despite a flailing economy and a post - 9/11 numbness, which still lingers. Now, West Palm Beach, though still the poorer relation, has moved from the room over the toolshed into the guesthouse.

Flagler's Key West docks. Henry Flagler imagined Key West as the southern gateway to the United States

Having built Xanadu, Flagler looked around for more worlds to conquer. Rather than going West, he went South, giving a rail connection to sleepy Fort Lauderdale. Further to the South, an enterprising woman named Julia Tuttle, who owned most of the land around an old frontier post named Fort Dallas, traded her land to Flagler for a rail line and urban improvements. The grateful citizens of Fort Dallas vowed to rename their tiny town "Flagler" after their benefactor, but Flagler modestly insisted that the city be named for the local native American tribe who'd lived along their namesake Miami River.

Having reached Miami, Flagler saw no reason to stop building. At that time, the late nineteenth century, Key West, on faraway Bone Island, was the largest city in Florida, a strange outlier where smugglers, South American insurrectos on the lam, and motor launch pirates lived cheek-by-jowl with cigar manufacturers, fishermen, artisans, and artists. And though Bone Island lay about 125 miles across mostly open water dotted by small points of coral and populated by a hardy and independent folk who called themselves Conchs (pronounced "Konk"), Flagler imagined steel rails leaping over the ocean to connect Key West to the mainland.

Flagler's Overseas Railroad

1903 was a time of giant dreams. In Great Britain, Ismay and Harland & Wolff were blueprinting that trio of vast ships they called Olympic, Titanic and Gigantic. At Kitty Hawk, the Wright brothers took flight. Far south of Florida, the Panama Canal was a-building. Flagler imagined that Canal transshipments would use bustling Key West as their main port if only items could be easily moved up the line. Havana, too, could be linked to Key West by a twice-daily steamer so the exotic tropical fruits of Cuba could be delivered by rail to New York in 48 hours.

The building of Flagler's railroad across the sea echoes the creation of the Panama Canal. Both construction projects took place almost simultaneously and faced similar hurdles. Much of the right-of-way for Flagler's train line had to be laboriously hacked out of mangrove swamp jungle and sawgrass wilderness, a Carboniferous Era world that was teeming with billions of malarial mosquitoes, scorpions, wolf spiders, and natural gas spouts, punctuated by Mesozoic Era alligators and snakes, a world where man did not belong and few men had ever ventured. Flagler's surveyor, William Krome, was nearly lost trying to chart a path through mainland Monroe County (an area bigger than Rhode Island with a population numbered just around one hundred even today). And even when a path was found, the unexpected kept happening (Lake Surprise was named for a very simple reason).

Men laying track south of Homestead, Florida, circa 1906. Although Flagler imagined the building of his railroad to be a straightforward proposition, Florida balked at being scarred. Sometimes rails sank into the soft ground and disappeared

But where the builders of the Panama Canal were attempting to join two bodies of water, the builders of the railroad were trying to join two bodies of land. The Florida Keys stretch in a languorous arc southwestward away from the mainland. There are hundreds of Keys, the remnant outcroppings of a long-extinct coral reef. The main arc is made up of perhaps three score larger islands, separated in places by channels narrow enough to jump across, and in other places by gaps as wide as seven miles. The Keys have almost no natural fresh water sources, some were covered completely in jungle, and others were practically deserts surrounded by a turquoise sea. All supplies had to be brought in by rail and boat, and new bridgebuilding techniques devised on the fly. Seven Mile Bridge is a wonder, for at its midpoint one might as well be in midocean; no land is visible, except a tiny key or two paralleling the road.

Conditions along the line were rough, right down to the officially invisible floating bawdy houses that lay moored offshore of the Keys (and Panama, too, for that matter; it's quite likely that some of the same men worked both projects and shared the company of some of the same ladies in both locales).

Marathon, Florida got its name because Flagler promised his workers huge bonuses if they could reach the Seven Mile Channel by a fixed date. It was a race they won. Flagler’s dominance in Florida was so great that the old abbreviation for Florida, "FLA" was said to be an abbreviation for "Flagler."

 

There were serious setbacks. While the Panama Canal had massive landslides in the Culebra Cut that swallowed work camps full of men whole, and then required duplicating the work of digging out amidst the corpses of the unlucky, the railroad faced hurricanes that did the same, and required the same rebuilding of the line under the same duress. By odd chance, the hurricanes of 1906 and 1908 both struck the line at its point of furthest progress, hurling building supplies (and men) into the ocean and testing (and damaging) the areas just under construction. Much had to be replaced and rebuilt and made stronger, but as time passed, it was time that became the great enemy, for the aging and ailing Flagler wished to ride his rail into Key West before he died.

Flagler got his wish in January of 1912, but his vision of Key West as America's major southern seaport never came true. Mobile and Tampa and especially New Orleans became the great harbors of the Southern Tier. Key West, crammed onto its tiny isle, had no place to grow. As a result, Flagler's East Coast Railway never carried the freight it might have, and went into receivership some years after his death in 1913. Still, it was a popular rail line for tourists who as of a winter's day, as it was said, could board the train in a snowbound New York and wake up in the tropics two days later with a view of nothing but blue sky, white clouds, and a bluegreen sea framed by palm trees.

The Overseas Railroad. Another "Eighth Wonder of The World," it functioned from 1913 to 1935

The Hurricane of 1928 didn't touch the Keys, but it was vicious enough to propel a 2 x 4 straight through a palm tree in Lake Ocheechobee. Juan Trippe worried that Key West could be disastrously cut off from the rest of the world by such a storm and made plans to move Pan Am off the island

The destruction of the Overseas Railroad in 1935 was world news. Even this Soviet magazine covered the disaster --- quite accurately too

A remnant of the Overseas Railroad standing next to the Overseas Highway

The Florida East Coast Railway was central to Juan Trippe’s plans in 1927. As the only feeder line to Key West, it carried most of the mail bound for Cuba and points south (there was a minimal amount carried by packet boats from the mainland). The Category 5 San Felipe Segundo Hurricane of 1928 on September 17^th of that year didn’t even brush the Keys, though it caused nightmarish havoc up around Lake Okeechobee, killing at least 2,500 people. The rail connection to Key West was interrupted briefly.

Trippe could do nothing about hurricanes themselves, but the break in contact with the mainland made him cognizant of just how isolated Key West really was (and is), Trippe had already begun to consider just how crowded and small Key West could sustain the infrastructure for his growing airline (by 1928, Pan Am owned eight Trimotors, Fokkers and Ford “Tin Lizzies”). He decided to make plans to relocate Pan American further north, in Miami. The move was fully completed by 1931.

Parts of the Overseas Highway date back as far as 1905, and were used as service roads for the Overseas Railroad. In 1935, the Florida East Coast Railway sold the Overseas Railroad to the State of Florida. Building the motor road became a Works Progress Administration (WPA) project during the Great Depression.It has been continuously improved since then

Seven Mile Bridge

Key West International Airport today. The runway is one of the shortest serving jets at an international airport and planes must lift off at a steep angle

It was a prescient decision. On Labor Day 1935, the most powerful hurricane ever to hit the United States tore through the Upper Middle Keys packing winds of over 200 miles per hour. The barometer dropped as low as and probably lower than 26.35. Keys residents and visitors unfortunate enough to be caught by the storm (which had not been forecast) were killed in the hundreds. Bodies of residents were found 40 miles from their homes, having been carried there on the winds. Twenty years later, three cars belonging to long-missing tourists were unearthed with their skeletonized occupants still inside. The storm unleashed a tsunami estimated to have been anywhere from 20 feet to 40 feet in height that washed away all the trackbed in the Middle Keys and derailed the cars of the rescue train sent to save who could be saved (the engine, weighing in at over 300,000 pounds withstood the wall of water without toppling over).

The keening winds sounded a tocsin for the FECRR. Without assets to rebuild, the railroad sold its rights to the State of Florida which built the Overseas Highway to Key West. Nowadays, it is just a few hours drive between Palm Beach and Key West, though a cautious driver who keeps his eyes on the road misses much of the grandeur of the trip. Built in places atop the rail line and in places parallel to it, the Overseas Highway overlooks the gallant ruins of what is now known as "Flagler's Folly.”

The passenger terminal at Key West International Airport. In 1982 the Conchs of the Keys, always a brawn lot, "seceded from the Union" over a tax dispute, and declared themselves the Conch Republic (Republica de la Concha). They maintain the Conch Republic as a tourist attraction and now claim all the territory of the State of Florida from Skeeter's Last Chance Saloon in Florida City, Florida southward as sovereign Conch territory. It’s nothing new. During the Civil War, Key West actually seceded from the Confederacy back into the Union

Juan Trippe's Key West docks. The historical marker at Key West International Airport (then Meacham Field)