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Before there were real estate developers, there were wreckers… and a good storm was more valuable than a good harvest. On the morning of October 4, 1873, a three-masted schooner called the Victor ran hard onto the outer reef roughly two miles off what would later become Fort Lauderdale Beach.Continue Reading

Before the luxury towers. Before the rooftop bars. Before the influencers and the Art Basel crowds and the $22 cocktails on Las Olas, South Florida ran on cocaine. Not metaphorically. Literally. In the late 1970s and through most of the 1980s, South Florida became the primary port of entry forContinue Reading

Prohibition didn’t make Americans stop drinking.It made them better planners. When the Volstead Act went into effect in 1920, Washington imagined a country sobering up out of respect for the law. South Florida imagined supply chains. You don’t ban a habit. You reroute it. And Broward County, quietly, was alreadyContinue Reading

If you want to understand Fort Lauderdale, don’t start with the skyline.Look down. Before the towers, before the drawbridges learned their choreography, before anyone thought “waterfront” meant brunch, the river was already making decisions. The New River didn’t wait for permission. It didn’t follow a polite, linear plan. It bent,Continue Reading

Every city has a founding myth.Fort Lauderdale has a founding rumor. Not the kind involving buried treasure or noble pioneers shaking hands at sunset. This one is quieter. Less ceremonial. It sounds like a boat idling just out of sight, a ledger that never quite balances, a shrug followed byContinue Reading