This book is based on real events. Only the people, places, and events are fictionalized. The stupidity is 100% real.
Seabreeze Ridge was a suburban and semi-rural community in Miami-Dade County’s far southwest. Though only 25 miles from Downtown Miami as the invasive European starling flies, it was worlds away from Brickell’s soulless, Manhattanized opulence or South Beach’s sticky, overpriced pomposity.
Despite innumerable Brooklynites’ assertions that Miami’s recorded history began in 2022 when it acquired a cybertronic bull statue used to shill crypto scams, Seabreeze Ridge’s story—like the rest of South Florida’s—dated back thousands of years.
The landscape was carefully managed by the Tequesta for centuries before the first powdered wig came ashore the Western Hemisphere. These Indigenous master urban planners dug miles-long canals through the limestone, constructed artificial shell islands spanning dozens of square acres, and resided in towns that housed tens of thousands up and down Florida’s coastal ridge.
Then the Spanish rocked up, refused to cover their mouths when they sneezed, and killed 95% of the local population that had no immunity to their diseases. Having eradicated or enslaved most of the area’s original inhabitants, the Spaniards gaped at the awe-inspiring emptiness of this gorgeous land they just discovered. They donned their plate armor and moved resolutely from the coastline into the interior before 95% of their own numbers were wiped out by malaria, yellow fever, and the poison-tipped arrows of thoroughly pissed Tequesta survivors. Turns out breastplates don’t protect against mosquitoes or point-blank projectiles to the face.
Then the Seminoles and Miccosukee moved in from the north, sent the Spaniards packing back to Saint Augustine and Pensacola, and claimed the rest of Florida for their own. They incorporated the surviving Tequesta into their tribes, as well as plenty of Black people who thought their labor was worth more than the going antebellum rate of zero dollars an hour.
Well, the Seminoles and Miccosukee entered Florida to escape a genocidal $20 portrait model named Andrew Jackson. He hated nothing more than Native and Black folks getting up to their own things, so he kicked off three massive official wars (or one long battle if you ask Native leaders) that ravaged Florida for the next 40 years. In total, the U.S. government deployed 30,000 troops against 3,000 Native warriors.
Things did not initially go well for the white boys in starched wool uniforms as they traversed South Florida’s cypress swamps. 1,500 were killed in meticulously laid ambushes, including a Virginian named Major Francis Langhorne Dade and all but two soldiers from his 110-man unit, thereby giving Miami-Dade County its present name.
Despite many similar spectacular Native victories, the U.S. Army burned, pillaged, and ground down its adversaries through sheer, unabating attrition. 4,500 Seminoles and Miccosukee were forcibly removed to Oklahoma, though 300 survived in the Everglades’ deepest sawgrass and mangrove mazes. They never signed a peace treaty with the United States and their descendants compose the 4,000 members of the modern-day Seminole Tribe of Florida and 600 members of the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians.[1]
Not much time elapsed before the next white man decided it was high time to once again profit from Native misfortune. Enter Cornelius Sapstrong. In 1905, this one-time itinerant Vaudeville pantomimer, unlicensed dentist, and amateur pet taxidermist heard about Henry Flagler’s recently completed railroad to Miami and just knew this new city on the bay would prove the perfect means to separate fools from their money.
So, he chartered a steamboat to South Florida and set about concocting the second-largest real estate scam in the country’s history. Collecting a small army of other like-minded grifters, he began selling parcels of land in western Miami-Dade County to northern buyers, sight unseen. Sapstrong christened the new metropolis “Seabreeze Ridge” to elicit images of cliffside mansions on Biscayne Bay, but the area’s tepid zephyrs only just managed to playfully jostle its sun-blotting clouds of mosquitoes.
Fully committed to the con, Sapstrong collected enough money from speculators to carve a street grid from the waterlogged prairie, which he proudly showed potential clients in the dry winter months from 1,000 feet on a new-fangled contraption called the aeroplane. The only problem was that those same streets were a good four inches underwater during South Florida’s rainy summer months.
But that sure wasn’t his problem! He absconded to Bolivia with $15 million in ill-gotten gains, where he tried to establish his own petty mountain kingdom, only to die a month after arrival from a hypoxia-related heart attack.
Meanwhile, thousands of poor souls tried to move into their non-existent houses only to be chased out by the alligators, black bears, rattlesnakes, panthers, and other unconsciously aggressive neighbors. The few who didn’t immediately skulk back north also had to contend with tiny crustaceans named Lepeophtheirus tunaris, but more commonly known as crotch critters.
These biting little buggers were most closely related to common sand fleas, and they loved nothing more than wriggling into and propagating colonies among people’s pubic regions. Unfortunately, the corresponding rash they created was easily confused with that caused by venereal crabs, single-handedly leading to a marked spike in Florida’s early 20th century divorce rate.
The Seminoles and Miccosukee had learned to deal with the critters centuries earlier, but no one asked them for input, and even if they had, the local tribes weren’t exactly in a generous mood.
Luckily, as the federal government indiscriminately sprayed kilotons of DEET across Florida during the 1940s in an attempt to eradicate mosquito-borne diseases, it also proved highly effective against the crotch critter, driving it to extinction in 1944. Unfortunately, three different subspecies of night heron depended exclusively on the crustacean for sustenance, which also led to their eradication, but no one gave a shit about birds at the time, so folks chalked this one up as an unambivalent win.
Check crotch critters and check mosquitoes. The only obstacle left to Seabreeze Ridge’s overdue rise was all the damn water. Cue the U.S. federal government.
In 1955, as Miami sought ever more electricity to light its burgeoning skyline, Uncle Sam decided that depleted uranium was just the ticket. Well, atomic reactors need a tremendous amount of water to keep from exploding and Seabreeze Ridge had it in spades. So, Florida Power & Light built the Poultry Point nuclear power plant on Seabreeze Ridge’s outskirts, replete with 20-foot-wide water intake valve that elegantly filtered all plants, animals, and other detritus that might fall into the reactor via a highly sophisticated, two by three-foot aluminum sign that read, “Caution, Water Intake Valve.”
But the crocodiles didn’t mind the laundromat-like ride inside the cooling tower. Indeed, they thrived in the warmer water and recovered spectacularly after being hunted to the verge of extinction. They just popped out of the spin cycle glowing light green, which made them that much easier to spot in the dark, so another win for human progress. And the frogs now had three heads, which just meant that much more food for the crocodiles.
With the water gone and Sapstrong’s street grid permanently exposed, Seabreeze Ridge’s time had finally come, and no one knew that better than New Jersey-based architect and virulent racist, Jeremy Fischer. The man’s personal motto (still visible on his tombstone) was, “No Fucking Blacks, Jews, or Goddamned Latins!!!” But man could he design the shit out of a two-story bungalow, which is why the American Institute of Architects continues to award an annual scholarship in his honor to students from historically underserved communities.
In 1957, Fischer set about designing a Utopian middle class family neighborhood where residents could shoot Blacks, Jews, and goddamned Latins on sight after sunset. He built 5,000 cookie-cutter two-bedroom houses in the Bavarian High Alps revival style (dude loved all things Third Reich), which he completed in 1960 and waited to fill with fellow, God-fearing bigots.
The funny thing about 1960 is that it was the year the first wave of Cubans crested over South Florida. 360,000, to be exact. This was terrible news for Fischer’s business model, as his customers were horrified that these Papist mongrels would refuse to speak English, gyrate their hips across Miami, seduce their daughters, build their own commercial and political power, and breed a new generation that would write overly joke-dense satirical books lampooning their city. This, of course, is exactly what came to pass, which is why hundreds of thousands of white folks fled north from Miami-Dade County to further fortify the Anglo bastions of Broward and Palm Beach Counties.
That all meant Fischer was stuck with thousands of houses he couldn’t sell. Upon deep, personal reflection, he came to the realization that he’d be willing to sell to Jews so long as they didn’t wear those Jew hats, or curl their Jew sideburns, or did anything else to explicitly Jewify the place.
So, in came the Jews, but there weren’t nearly enough to fill all the houses. By 1980, only half the development was occupied. But guess what else happened the same year! That’s right, the Mariel Boatlift kicked off, bringing 125,000 more Cubans to Miami! Will no one save us from this plague!?
Fischer did some more deep introspection and realized that some of these spics were white, some were pretty dark, and most were somewhat brownish—almost Italian-like in appearance. So, he swallowed an enormous, leaden ball of intolerance in the name of capitalism and allowed Cubans into the neighborhood after significantly jacking up his prices. When the federal government insisted in 1985 that he couldn’t continue to keep out the Blacks, it proved a bridge too far for the man, and his actual spleen ruptured, killing him instantly.
Eventually, the Cubans moved out and Venezuelans, Haitians, and then Central American farm workers moved in, along with Bahamians priced out of their neighborhoods to the east. By then, Seabreeze Ridge had turned into exactly what Fischer most dreaded: a multi-ethnic lower and working-class neighborhood with hardly a white person to be found.
That, of course, gave past local governments license to just about stop providing public services. Many of the area’s streets remained unpaved and heavily potholed. Its westernmost regions abutting the Everglades filled with illegal dump sites, each of which contained tons of used tires, toxic chemicals, and house remodeling detritus people in other neighborhoods couldn’t be bothered with driving to a landfill. Burned-out cars connected to Miami’s burgeoning drug trade regularly lit up the night sky.
Fischer’s development remained the residential heart of Seabreeze Ridge to the present day, but the unincorporated neighborhood had a smattering of tropical fruit and vegetable orchards, a warehouse district, and environmentally sensitive land abutting the Everglades slated for rezoning into a truck park when—as mentioned earlier—the ground shook.
[1] For those wondering, everything I wrote above is 100% historically accurate. What follows is up to your interpretation but based on far more facts than one would hope.
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