Miami: Where not all alligators live in the swamp

Chapter 30 of A Kiwi on the Amtrak Tracks

MIAMI was my last stop on the mainland of the US, before I headed to the Pacific islands of Hawai‘i. I don’t know what I was expecting when I arrived. I was aware, as most people are, that Miami was a thriving tourist hotspot. A seaport city with beautiful beaches, lots of partying, and lots of people.

Miami sits in the south of the Florida Peninsula, a nine-hour train journey from St Augustine via Orlando. Miami is the only major American city founded by a woman, Mrs Julia Tuttle: which is one of the reasons I wanted to visit it.

Mrs Tuttle was a prominent businesswoman and an original landowner in what is now modern-day Miami. She recognised the attractive location and growth prospects of the tip of the Florida peninsula, and lobbied a railway owner of the day, Henry Flagler, to build a railway line into the area. Flagler was skeptical at first, because the far tips of peninsulas normally don’t develop very much. Take New York City, for instance: it’s at the bottom end of Long Island, not at the far tip, windy Montauk Point, where there isn’t much apart from the seagulls. Likewise, most of the development in Michigan is at the south end of the Lower Peninsula, not at the Mackinaw / Upper Peninsula end, even with the bridge.