Llewellyn King: The agony and heroism of wonderful and awful Florida, in the hurricane expressway
The Florida National Guard cleaning up damage in Keaton Beach, Fla., following Hurricane Helene.
Cry, beloved Florida.
Florida, where the old go to rest — their reward after life’s labors — and the young go to play at its great amusement parks; where the rich live in Palm Beach and shop on Worth Avenue, and the poor harbor west of I-95; where citrus grows; where the Everglades record natural history from a time past; and where, in Key West, writers and artists find their nirvana of social misfits, drunks, addicts and creators, funky and inspiring.
Florida, where Apollo 11 took us to the Moon and where many a person from troubled lands has found refuge.
Florida, where Miami is a jewel in the crown of creativity and for all Spanish-speaking Latin Americans, their El Dorado.
On the night of Oct. 9, a night of horror and fear, Hurricane Milton delivered a cruel and malevolent blow, made the more so by its accompanying and capricious tornadoes. They were be spared nothing, the people and the animals of the Sunshine State, savaged by this terrible storm named, ironically, Milton — a name that invokes the great English poet, who said on going blind, “They also serve who only stand and wait.”
We, in our way, far from the storm, stood and waited, glued to our televisions and computers as we watched reality unfold; the threat of death arrived, buildings collapsed, metal flew, trees tumbled and first responders, the ever-ready shock troops of society got to work. Our time to serve is now with our generosity as the broken mend, having lost all they possess.
Yet, where we saw tragedy, we saw heroism.
All those heroes will never be counted to the last person, but they helped get Florida through its night of horror, just as they helped Florida and North Carolina after Hurricane Helene.
They, the first responders, are many, from the military to the police, the firefighters, the ambulance staff, the nurses and doctors, down to the assistants and porters.
One should add the electric linemen and women who seek to restore power, de-energize felled lines and start the vital work of saving lives by getting the lights on so that society can begin the journey back to normalcy in everything from bathing to cooking to making contact with those who have worried in silence — those who wonder if loved ones have survived.
This time around, the electrical workers are particularly stressed. Many have been working night and day since Helene swept through. Now they must lift the load again.
It is little known -- so little celebrated -- how the electric utilities are part of an extraordinary network of mutual assistance in which linemen and women board their trucks and drive hundreds even thousands of miles to begin the vital work of making fallen lines safe and restoring power. Sometimes they sleep in their vehicles or share what accommodation can be found.
In Florida and North Carolina, electrical workers will be laboring in dangerous conditions for weeks until the lights come back on and shattered lives again feel the balm of electrical service.
Raise a toast to the men and women who climb the poles in unfamiliar locales, sometimes warding off wild creatures, from snakes to civet cats, which have sought safety from floodwaters up electric poles.
They will be hampered, as will builders and the army of repair people who will be working for a long time because of a supply chain crisis. This will be felt in every aspect of the restoration in the storm-ravaged areas, but maybe most acutely so in the electric sector.
Much heavy electrical equipment, like large transformers and generators, is bespoke, made-to-order, often in China. This has presented an ongoing crisis for some time, which will gain attention as the rebuilding takes place. Even small transformers for poles are in short supply.
Artisans can work around materials shortages with ingenuity, but in the electric power system that is a limited option; it can’t be fixed with a compromise.
While bending knee to first responders, let us not forget the reporters, broadcast and print, who brought us the long night of Milton with disregard for personal safety. We saw the rain-soaked TV reporters bending into the wind lashed by rain, standing knee-deep in rising water, and sharing with us the potential lethality of airborne roofs and tree limbs.
But they weren’t alone. Behind every reporter is a chain of people from producers to camera operators to sound engineers to those who install and operate emergency generators. And don’t forget the writers, unseen, but on the front lines of the destruction.
The main compensation is the camaraderie of those who respond, those who march into tragedy to save lives and restore normalcy, and those from the Fourth Estate who rush there to tell us all about it.
Get well, Florida, and immeasurable thanks to those who were on hand to bind your wounds in your night of need and afterwards.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.co and he’s based in Rhode Island.
Jill Richardson: Right-wing-run Florida's new law imperils academic freedom there
“Unveiling of the Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World” (1886) (oil on canvas), by Edward Moran, in The J. Clarence Davies Collection at Museum of the City of New York.
Via OtherWords.org
Unveiling of the Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World (1886) by Edward Moran. Oil on canvas. The J. Clarence Davies Collection, Museum of the City of New York.
Florida just passed a law that — to put it mildly — grossly violates academic freedom. Under the new bill, recently signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, a right-wing Republican and in the past a fervent supporter of Donald Trump, students and faculty will be surveyed about their political views to ensure “intellectual freedom and ideological diversity.”
The real intent appears to be the opposite.
The bill doesn’t specify what will happen with this data once it’s collected. But DeSantis and the bill’s sponsor, state Sen. Ray Rodrigues, have suggested the responses could be used to target schools for budget cuts if politicians find the views of student and faculty objectionable.
This is a gross violation of academic freedom, which is supposed to protect students and faculty and pave the way for the production of knowledge.
As a PhD student who teaches undergraduates, I’m having visions of professors being subjected to forced confessions, as in China’s Cultural Revolution. (Scholars were so scorned then that the word “intelligentsia” — zhishifenzi — became derogatory.)
To see how state interference with academic freedom is problematic, consider Lysenkoism.
In the mid-20th Century, Soviet agronomist Trofim Lysenko rejected Mendelian genetics and instead embraced a pseudoscience of his own creation. Communists governments adopted Lysenkoism as a “Communist” science of agriculture, with disastrous consequences. Stalin executed scientists who disagreed with Lysenkoism, even while Lysenko’s pseudoscience produced famines.
I hope that Florida Republicans — who are so concerned that people like me will turn students into Communists that they’re also now mandating professors teach the “evils of Communism” — will note the irony.
Florida Republicans might also like to know that a court case upholding academic freedom (Adams vs. University of North Carolina Wilmington) was essential to protecting conservative speech as well. In that case, the court sided with Prof. Michael Adams, who’d been denied a promotion over columns he’d written for a right-wing Web site, ruling that his views were protected speech.
The second part of Florida’s bill stipulates that students may not be shielded from “ideas and opinions that they may find uncomfortable, unwelcome, disagreeable, or offensive.” Again, this is not a problem. It doesn’t need fixing. Academic freedom already takes care of it.
Setting aside the irony that legislators seem to want to exclude certain views they disagree with, I also worry that this law will ban professors from managing their classrooms.
I teach controversial topics regularly. They are emotional topics and many students come to class with different, sometimes opposing views. It feels like playing with dynamite because there is a lot to balance in running the class in a way that is fair and conducive to learning for all.
But what do you do when a student endorses genocide during a class discussion? And follows it up with a two thumbs up endorsement for racism? Does curtailing disruptive behavior like this, which prevents others from learning, count as shielding students from uncomfortable “ideas and opinions”?
On the other hand, what do you do when your class wants to use class time to organize for social causes, and your job is to get them to learn an academic discipline, not Rally For Your Political Ideology 101?
Or one student cries because of what other students have said? Or leaves class because it is too emotionally painful for him or her to be there?
Those things have happened in my class. Academics need to have the freedom to manage their classes, and that means finding a balance between protecting their students’ emotions and helping them when emotions get in the way of learning.
Most of all, teachers and students need the freedom to look at ideas academically — and express their views plainly — without fear of retribution from state authorities who insist on “intellectual freedom” even as they seek to stamp it out.
Jill Richardson is pursuing a PhD in sociology at the University of Wisconsin.
Robert Whitcomb: What let Flagler revolutionize Florida
A 1913 advertisement extols the many advantages of traveling on the Florida East Coast Railway, the "New Route to the Panama Canal".
From a talk I gave on March 17 to a Florida group
— Robert Whitcomb
‘When looking back at Henry Flagler's life, George W. Perkins, of J.P. Morgan & Co., reflected,
"But that any man could have the genius to see of what this wilderness of sand and underbrush was capable and then have the nerve to build a railroad there, is more marvelous than similar development anywhere else in the world."
My interest in railroads goes back to dim memories of taking the train to see relatives in Florida, other parts of the South and the Midwest as a child. Traveling in those Pullman compartments was exciting! I wrote a master’s thesis on East Coast railroads while in graduate school. And I’ve been fortunate to live in places with passenger trains, mostly in the Northeast but also when we lived in Europe in the 1980s. I love passenger trains and I’m happy to see that they’re making a comeback in Florida.
The dramatic story of the Florida East Coast Railway has been told many, many times and is easily available, especially in Palm Beach. So I’ll just give a brief chronology of it and then, of more interest to me, anyway, talk about the social and economic conditions that presaged it and kept it going for so long.
The story of Henry M. Flagler, the railway’s founder, is astonishing: From 1885 to 1913, Flagler built an empire in Florida of cross-promotional railroads, hotels, resorts and steamship lines (with close connections to his trains). His vision led to the creation of many communities, and the great expansion of some already existing ones, such as Jacksonville, from northeast Florida all the way down to Key West, most famously Palm Beach and Miami. And his work led to a huge expansion of commerce in the state, most notably tourism and agriculture. No wonder you see his name everywhere: Consider Flagler College, Flagler County, Flagler Memorial Bridge, Flagler Beach, etc., etc.
There were other great Florida early developers, mostly notably Henry Plant on the state’s west coast, but Flagler was the most important.
Henry Morrison Flagler was a partner of John D. Rockefeller in the creation, in 1867, in Cleveland, of Standard Oil, one of the greatest Gilded Age corporate behemoths. Of course, Flagler became very rich in the process. He also became very expert in railroad engineering and economics because Standard Oil obviously had to ship its petroleum long distances. The oil was first used primarily for kerosene, followed by oil to run trains, among other things (!), gasoline and other petro products.\
In 1878 he traveled with his first wife, who, like many others in those pre-antibiotic days, had tuberculosis, to winter in Jacksonville. It was then that the potential of Florida, which at that time had a small population and not much of an economy, as a winter resort and year-round agricultural area, started to jump out at him.
Then, after she died, in 1881, he married one of her caregivers, who, by the way, turned out to be crazy.
With this new spouse, he traveled in 1882 to St. Augustine, which he found charming, if a bit bedraggled, and lacking in good hotels and easy and reliable transportation to get there. He saw the promise of Florida and was determined to achieve it. So he gradually withdrew from active management duties at Standard Oil to pursue his Florida interests.
In 1885, he began building the big Ponce de Leon Hotel in St. Augustine. To start to address the region’s transportation issues, he bought railways, most importantly the Jacksonville, St. Augustine & Halifax Railroad, and converted the latter to standard gauge from narrow gauge, which made it much more efficient. This railroad was extended to the south and in 1895 was renamed the Florida East Coast Railway-Flagler System, which revolutionized life on the east coast of Florida.
Meanwhile, he was building up Saint Augustine as a major resort town, including developing three more hotels, and he built more hotels southward toward Daytona, which he reached in 1889.
Then in 1892, he started extending his line much further south. He was encouraged in this effort by the State of Florida’s providing HUGE grants of land to encourage railroad expansion and other development. He took advantage of owning land that had massive potential for developing agricultural, timber, phosphate and other operations – much of the products of which ended up being shipped on his railroad. Pure synergy. Of course, much swamp-draining work was necessary in the process.
By 1894, his railroad reached West Palm Beach, from which he looked east to the big resort opportunities of Palm Beach island. So he built the first version of the Breakers there, as well as the Royal Poinciana.
In 1896 Flagler’s railroad reached then-tiny Miami, which he proceeded to turn into a major winter resort and agricultural area, with big hotels. A major incentive for developing South Florida was that two hard freezes that ravaged the citrus and vegetable crops in most of Florida in the winter of 1894-95 did not affect the area south of Palm Beach. So not only did that make Miami more alluring for winter visitors than, say, Daytona, it promoted the agricultural development of South Florida.
Flagler relentlessly worked to create full-fledged towns that would bring more people and commerce to his businesses. These people included farmers to grow and ship produce, most of it to the north, laborers to develop the area and staff for hotels and resorts. He built schools, brought in utilities, arranged for stores to be built, created parks and even financed churches and cemeteries. It was a mix of enlightened self interest tinctured with philanthropy. Synergy, synergy, synergy!
Meanwhile, he had long been fascinated by the prospect of extending the Florida East Coast Railway to Key West. One of his hopes was that that little city, which for a time had been – bizarrely -- the biggest in Florida, could be turned into a major international port, especially with the coming of the Panama Canal. It never happened, although Miami, which Flagler had a great role in developing, became a major international port. Flagler long saw South Florida as a key area for hemispheric trade, but Miami, not Key West, turned out to be the linchpin.
The first train on what was called the Key West Extension, ran in 1912. Flagler died the next year, with his dream fulfilled.=
The extension was one of the engineering marvels of the age but the great Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 did so much damage that it was abandoned. Now, of course, you can drive on the extension’s exact route.
In any event, the railway went on to prosper with a growing number of passengers, most of them drawn by the sun from the affluent but cold Northeast, Mid-Atlantic and Upper Midwest states, and a hefty freight business, much of it to carry the stuff produced on land granted to the railroad by the state and then sold off for agriculture.
The railroad mostly prospered until the late ‘20s, when the crazily speculative Florida land boom burst; two hurricanes in South Florida didn’t help either. Florida’s railroads suffered mightily, and the Florida East Coast Railway went into bankruptcy protection in 1931. In any event, freight and passenger operations continued, with, it should be said, long-haul trains from New York and the Midwest continuing to use its tracks.
But FEC passenger train service ended in 1968 after very nasty labor disputes. Still, the railway freight business continues and, as I note below, there’s a new FEC passenger train connection.
Of course, the coming of America’s automobile culture and associated construction of many more and better better roads from the 1920s on, and especially the Interstate Highway System in the late ‘50s, took a big bite out of the Florida East Coast Railway.
At the same time, longer life expectancies, the expansion of the middle class, the introduction of Social Security payments and the decades in which corporate pensions (now disappearing except for upper management) were common helped drive a huge increase in people retiring in Florida. When will it end?
Let’s look at some of the factors that enabled Flagler to build his railroad and associated developments in Florida, in addition to the state giving him lots of land for his railway and for associated development.
First was the great wealth he was able to accumulate as a result of the American industrial revolution, which gave him piles of money to spend to build his Florida empire. Part of this technological and economic revolution was development of better steel track and the aforementioned standardized railroad-track gauge. Coal-powered earth-moving equipment to drain swamps and build road beds were also essential, as was the revolutionary effect of the development of machine tools in – The first machine tools were invented.
A machine tool is a machine for handling or machining metal or other rigid materials, usually by cutting, boring, grinding, shearing, or other forms of deformation.
These included the screw cutting lathe, cylinder boring machine and the milling machine. Machine tools made the economical manufacture of precision metal parts possible, although it took several decades to develop effective techniques. Machine tools were obviously very important in train and track making, among other things.
Indeed, Flagler’s Florida empire wouldn’t have happened without what’s called the Second Industrial Revolution, also known as the Technological Revolution.
Advances in manufacturing and production technology enabled the widespread adoption of technological systems such as telegraph and railroad networks, gas and water supply, and sewage systems. The enormous expansion of rail and telegraph lines after 1870 allowed a vastly increased movement of people and ideas. Then came electrical power and telephones.
The Second Industrial Revolution was also, of course, accelerated by rapidly increasing use of oil, the source of Flagler’s wealth.
A synergy between iron and steel, railroads and coal (and petroleum) developed at the beginning of the Second Industrial Revolution. Railroads allowed cheap transportation of materials and products, which in turn led to the production of cheap rails to build more railways. Railroads also benefited from cheap coal for their steam locomotives. Virtuous circle!
Meanwhile, Flagler had learned before his Florida projects how to use the law for maximum benefit. He was an expert in partnership and incorporation laws and in using the U.S. Constitution’s new 14th Amendment, which affirmed equal protection of the laws to all persons, to protect businesses from many lawsuits and even criminal prosecutions. This was especially after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the 1886 that said that companies had legal protection as “persons’’—a still controversial ruling.=
Also very helpful to furtherance of his Florida projects was the discovery that mosquitoes spread such diseases as yellow fever and malaria as part of the development of germ theory. Draining swamps near Flagler’s developments and the use of such early pesticides as kerosene (made by Standard Oil!) made promoting Florida as a resort and retirement place easier. And that Florida is flat, while meaning that its wet subtropical climate would produce a lot of swampland, also cut construction costs. Among other things, he didn’t need to build tunnels or do a lot of blasting.
As I implied above, improvements in train engineering and standardization (especially of track gauge) made passenger and freight trains much faster as well as more reliable and comfortable. This made growing and shipping produce, lumber, turpentine, etc. ,to the north much more profitable. Mining and shipping phosphate, of which Florida had a lot as the pile of limestone that it is, was also developed into a major industry. Then there was the expansion of electricity, which enabled safe and bright lighting in buildings and railway cars as well as such new luxuries as fans. Before air conditioning as we know it began on trains, in the 1930s, some passenger trains had primitive cooling systems involving having fans blow are over blocks of ice from New England.
And we shouldn’t underestimate the role of the development of luxurious Pullman sleeper cars and dining cars that were sometimes as good as fancy restaurants. While trains were getting faster, it still was a trip of two or three days from the Northeast and Midwest, and so comfort was important and the Gilded Age nouveau riche had the money to pay for it.
By the way, it’s hard to exaggerate the effect on residential and business development in Florida of modern air conditioning from the 1930s on. But at least electric fans were a start. Anyway, obviously without air conditioning, Florida’s Congo-like summer climate would have kept many winter residents and businesses from becoming year-round ones.
Very important, of course, was the developing role of new refrigeration technologies in preserving the vast amount of produce grown and shipped from Florida by train – a big business for Flagler. At first ice blocks from northern lakes were used on the freight cars. Refrigerated railroad cars created a national industry in vegetables and fruit that could now be consumed far away. The sale of this stuff was a bonanza for Flagler’s empire, which included vast acreages of land that could sold off and turned into large farms.
Flagler’s interest in developing vast tracts for agriculture on land that the state had given him along the route of his railroad was heightened by the development of improved fertilizers (much of which used Florida-mined phosphate!) and better equipment to cultivate and harvest crops.
Fast trains were essential for meeting the burgeoning demand of the rich and middle class in the North for fresh vegetables and fruit in the winter – demand created in part by the arrival of modern advertising.
At the same time, improvements in paper making, presses and inks made producing free-standing brochures and flyers, as well as ads in newspapers and magazines, touting the attractions of Florida that much easier.
Indeed, Flagler was a brilliant salesman. He took out ads in northern publications, and planted news stories about the development of “America’s Riviera’’. And he bought or started newspapers in Florida to tout its wonders, as a vehicle for real estate and travel ads and so on. He was one of the early geniuses in mass marketing to America’s rapidly expanding consumer society, in which people learned about, and wanted, a far wider variety of products and services than ever before.
The growing sophistication in the late 19th Century of modern building construction materials, for example, steel-reinforced concrete, also greatly aided Flagler’s construction projects, especially his resort hotels up and down Florida’s East Coast. Indeed, his Ponce De Leon Hotel in St. Augustine is said to have been the first large poured-concrete building project.
He had learned at Standard Oil the benefits of using state-of-the art equipment and building materials. While the initial cost was higher than using mediocre stuff, the longer-term benefits for efficiency and marketing made his emphasis on quality the right choice.
As I keep noting, the State of Florida gave Flagler’s vast acreages of undeveloped land (8,000 acres per mile of track south of Daytona) in return for extending his railroad, and the development that followed. The state gave other Florida railroads lots of land, too, but Flager proved to be the most adept at using it. His company then made piles of money from marketing this land for resorts, year-round residential communities, agribusiness and other lucrative businesses. Without these land grants his empire would have been much, much smaller. By the way, it could be said that Florida was the first place in the world where building resorts and winter and retirement communities became major industries.
And, dating back to his experience in the grain and then oil business, Flagler was an expert in making secret deals. An example is his quiet purchase of land, using dummy companies, that he wanted to develop since the price would obviously go up a lot if owners knew someone as rich as Henry Flagler was interested in a tract. It reminds me of how Disney quietly bought up land for Walt Disney World, whose development and opening I covered back in the early ’70s. And Flagler was an expert in buying distressed enterprises – most notably northern Florida rail lines – at cheap prices and turning them around.
With the goal of transforming Florida’s east coast, Flagler would ride his own railroad in disguise in an effort to discover properties that could be developed into resorts and entire communities. The disguise obviously was to avoid tipping off landowners of his plan and thus drive up prices.
And the coming of oil-fueled locomotives, to replace coal, after the turn of the 20th Century, made train travel cleaner and more efficient in getting people to and fro the Flagler empire.
Electricity and the rapid adoption of indoor plumbing made staying in winter resort hotels much more alluring, and the faster trains from the 1880s on made it much faster to get there from, say New York. Flagler himself had a keen eye for the aesthetics of hotel and other buildings, inside and out, and of the high marketability of new creature comforts, including such recreational attractions as swimming pools, tennis courts and golf courses.
The Industrial Revolution was creating a class of rich folks who had the means to travel from (mostly) the Northeast and Upper Midwest to the resort hotels built and promoted by Henry Flagler and his Florida East Railway. Previously, most of them had mostly thought of going to luxurious SUMMER resorts relatively close to such wealth centers as New York, such as Newport.
But faster and more trains made it much easier than it had been to travel to Florida for its winter pleasures. The hotels promoted the Florida East Coast Railway and vice versa as Pullman sleeping cars, as well as dining cars, became more and more luxurious. And it became a status thing for your friends up north to know that you spent time in Flagler System hotels and perhaps later, with development of services and infrastructure spawned by the railroad, in your own capacious place in South Florida. Starting in the ‘20s, showing up back north with a tan became seen as a sign of status and wealth. (No one worried about skin cancer, sadly.)
And such increasingly popular sports associated with wealth as golf, tennis and yachting could, unlike in the North, be enjoyed in Florida in the winter – another promotional tool! Facilities for these sports were provided at the great resort hotels.
The Spanish-American War, in 1898, by bringing many troops from other parts of the country to Florida for the first time, further expanded national interest in the state.
Now to the labor situation during Flagler’s empire building – a situation that was generally very favorable to a mogul like Flagler. For one thing, unions were weak in America then, and in some places, including Florida, virtually nonexistent, and, anyway, state and local governments usually sided with owners/managers, and not with average workers.
Indeed, there were dark sides to Flagler’s empire building. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, Flagler, like many industrialists, virtually all of whom were white, across the South, leased African American convict labor from the state. Convicts helped extend his Florida East Coast Railway (FECR) from West Palm Beach to Miami, cleared the land for his Royal Palm Hotel in Miami and graded the rail lines running from the mainland to his FECR extension across the Keys.
Industrialists like Flagler also used another system of forced labor that mostly targeted African Americans: debt peonage. A federal statute outlawed peonage, but in practice, it overlapped with convict labor. Convicts held beyond their sentences became debt peons, forced to labor to pay off debt owed to their lessor-turned-employer. Escaped peons were often arrested for vagrancy and leased out as convicts.
Convict lease laws in almost every Southern state provided a means for authorities to arrest freed people for such pseudo-crimes as vagrancy, lease them to private companies and force their labor.
Convict leasing generated revenue and provided a tool to intimidate and control black citizens. For businesses, the state offered vulnerable laborers who could be brutalized at whim, with chains, hounds, whips, sweat boxes, stringing up workers by the thumbs. Sanitary conditions were often terrible, and medical attention scant.
White immigrant workers, especially in the gigantic project to extend the Florida East Coast Railway to Key West, often also had it bad:
Flagler worked with Northern labor agencies to lure new immigrants to work on his railroad extension to Key West in often very dangerous conditions that included extreme heat and humidity and disease-carrying mosquitoes, not to mention hurricanes.
Workers were often refused passage off the Keys unless they worked off hefty transportation, boarding and commissary fees while men who had been promised positions as cooks, foremen or interpreters were compelled to work as laborers. Those who refused to work were sometimes denied food. Foremen often carried guns, and some sick laborers were beaten and threatened with death if they didn’t work.
Cheap labor indeed!
It’s hard to know how much Flagler knew of these conditions – obviously he knew something. In some ways, he was a kindly and charitable character.
Flagler’s empire building was also aided by the climate of political corruption of the Gilded Age. He had the money to bribe state and local politicians to make it easier for him to do his projects. (He even apparently bribed the Florida Legislature and Governor to pass a law in 2001 that made incurable insanity grounds for divorce so he could divorce his insane second wife in order to marry his third wife.)
First came the rich, but the Industrial Revolutions, mostly after the turn of the 20th Century, also created a middle class that, with careful saving, could afford to visit Florida. Few could afford to stay in Flagler’s grand hotels but could pay for the innumerable other accommodations (some built by Flagler) that sprang up to no small degree because of the creation of the Florida East Coast Railway. Many of these folks liked it so much they decided to move here. Sadly, many of them lost their shirts in the implosion of the Florida land boom in the late ‘20s but the population kept growing….
Of course, the coming of America’s automobile culture and associated construction of many more and better roads from the 1920s on, and especially the Interstate Highway System, took a big bite out of the Florida East Coast Railway, as did the use of big trailer trucks to carry Florida products.
At the same time, longer life expectancies, the expansion of the middle class, the introduction of Social Security payments and the decades in which corporate pensions (now disappearing except for upper management) were common helped drive a huge increase in people retiring in Florida. It’s hard to predict how long might continue.
In any event, it’s nice to know that Brightline passenger trains were running on the Florida East Coast Railway before the pandemic shut it down. It’s supposed to reopen in the fall.
This is good news for Florida. It needed a modern (for the time) rail system developed in the late 19th and early 20th Century because it was underdeveloped and poor. Now it needs one to reduce the choking car congestion that’s a result of the development jump-started by Henry M. Flagler.
Conn. vs. Fla. may be equal contest
By CHRIS POWELL
MANCHESTER, Conn.
With snowstorms seeming to arrive every few days, little room left for stacking
the snow, road-salt supplies nearly exhausted, state and municipal snow-removal
budgets in deficit, and the Connecticut General Assembly reconvening, many people in
Connecticut feel that they have had enough of the state.
It's little consolation to them that Connecticut may have the best snowplowing
operation in the country, with the state's major roads almost always kept
passable throughout even the heaviest snowstorms. For besides the extra snow,
Connecticut's economy and standard of living are still declining, which may be
the cause of most of the surliness here; the snow just makes people feel their
resentments more keenly.
As a result many of them look south enviously, especially to subtropical
Florida, to which many Connecticut residents already have fled, either
permanently or just for the winter. Indeed, when the University of Connecticut's
basketball teams play colleges in Florida, the crowd often seems to favor the
visitors.
But while it may be harder to appreciate Connecticut after shoveling snow or
falling on ice, Florida has its own climate disadvantages. In the late summer
and early fall Florida can be crossed by as many hurricanes as Connecticut suffers
snowstorms in the winter, and the resulting property damage in Florida is far
greater than that inflicted by snowstorms in Connecticut, just as
weather-related electricity outages in Florida can last longer.
Because of bad weather a few weeks ago it took three days and several flight
reschedulings for a recently retired couple from Connecticut to escape the state
by air for their new winter home in South Florida, one of those tightly
regulated condominium complexes that forbid admission to anyone under 55. The
couple had hardly begun breathing the state-income-tax-free air when a line of
thunderstorms stalled overhead for 24 hours and dumped 14 inches of rain on
them, flooding their new neighborhood, closing its roads, and incapacitating
sewer lines and toilets for a couple of days.
It wasn't a snowstorm; it was worse.
Not long after the couple got dried out and settled, some university researchers
reported that alligators, which which infest South Florida, not only swim stealthily
but also climb trees, in part for better surveillance of their prey.
Told of the study, the new arrivals from Connecticut refused to be
concerned. While they had not yet read their condo association's many rules,
they figured that, in addition to excluding people younger than 55, there was
probably one against alligators climbing trees on the property and eating the
residents.
They shouldn't count on it. Annoying as Connecticut's snow has been, at least it
also has gotten in the way of the state's own many predators, both those with
four legs and those with two. There's never much crime in bad weather.
* * *
Two executives of the Metropolitan Transit Authority came to Hartford last week
so Gov Dan Malloy could reprimand them in front of the television cameras about
the MTA's mismanagement of the Metro-North Commuter Railroad, whose many recent
disasters have impaired service from New Haven to Grand Central Station in New
York. The MTA executives duly promised improvements soon.
But while the governor got to look tough, he really didn't increase
Connecticut's leverage with the MTA, a New York state agency paid by Connecticut
to operate the state's rail lines into New York. To gain such leverage
Connecticut needs a plan, just as Metro-North needs a plan to improve rail
service.
Connecticut's plan might include demanding representation on the MTA's board,
the renegotiation of Connecticut's contract with the MTA, and a study of how
Connecticut could take over the management of its rail lines into New York.
Until Connecticut has a rail-service-improvement plan that goes beyond scolding
MTA officials on television, the MTA may assume that it can take its time about
improving service here.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn.
Please respond to www.newenglanddiary.com via rwhitcomb51@gmail.com.