Miami, FL
Pan American World Airways was BORN as a Caribbean mail carrier — its inaugural flight was October 19, 1927, from Key West to Havana in a Fairchild FC-2 floatplane chartered from West Indian Aerial Express. Pan Am moved its U.S. terminal to Miami in 1929 and from there built the world's first global airline. Sikorsky and Martin flying boats — the famous Clippers — connected Miami to Havana, the Caribbean, Buenos Aires, and Rio; the Boeing 314s eventually reached London and Manila across both oceans. During WWII, Pan Am quietly built a network of African airfields under contract to the U.S. military, supporting the South Atlantic ferry route to North Africa. Pan Am collapsed in December 1991 but the airport it built is the busiest international gateway in Florida. The Miami Tower (cumulus pillars over the city in summer afternoons) and the Everglades west of the field define the visual experience. Today KMIA also hosts a major MIA-area corporate aviation community — KOPF Opa-locka and KTMB Miami Executive handle most GA traffic.
Coconut Grove, Miami — Dinner Key was Pan American Airways' main flying-boat terminal from 1934 to 1945. Sikorsky S-42s, Martin M-130s ("China Clipper"), and Boeing 314 ("Yankee Clipper") departed here for Havana, Buenos Aires, the Caribbean, and across both oceans. The Spanish Mission-style 1934 terminal building still stands and now houses Miami City Hall — walk inside to see the original globe in the main hall (showing Pan Am's 1930s routes). 9 nm south of KMIA. The Pan Am Historical Foundation and the History Miami Museum nearby preserve the Clipper era.
James Deering was the vice president of International Harvester. In 1916 he completed a winter estate on Biscayne Bay south of Miami that he called Vizcaya, after a Basque province his family had no actual connection to. He picked the name because he liked the sound. The estate took 1,000 workers, about 10 percent of the population of Miami at the time. Italian Renaissance architect F. Burrall Hoffman Jr., painter and designer Paul Chalfin, and landscape architect Diego Suarez built it as a 16th-century Italian estate transplanted to the subtropics. The 70-room main villa wraps a central courtyard. The Renaissance-style formal gardens cover 10 acres of fountains, grottos, mounts, parterres, and statuary, much of it bought during a six-month European antique-buying expedition. The "stone barge" in Biscayne Bay — a carved limestone breakwater modeled on an Italian carnival barge — was placed as protection for the south terrace and as a decorative folly. Deering's actual yacht docked beyond it. Deering only lived to enjoy Vizcaya for nine years. He died in 1925. His nieces sold the estate to Miami-Dade County in 1952, and it has been a public museum since. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1994 — one of the few private homes from the American Country House Era of the early 20th century still substantially intact, with its furnishings, artwork, and gardens together as the original residents experienced them. Vizcaya served as the host venue for the 1987 Reagan-Pope John Paul II summit and the 1994 Summit of the Americas. Hurricane Andrew (1992) and Hurricane Irma (2017) both damaged the gardens and the barge. Recovery and ongoing climate-resilience retrofits have been continuous. The Main House is open Wednesday through Monday; gardens daily.
Edward Leedskalnin was a five-foot, 100-pound Latvian stonemason whose teenage fiancée called off their wedding the day before the ceremony. He emigrated to the United States in 1912, drifted west, contracted tuberculosis, and in 1923 bought an acre of undeveloped land in Florida City and started building. Over the next 28 years, he quarried, moved, and carved 1,100 tons of oolitic limestone — Florida's local "coral rock" — into a sculpture garden that he called Rock Gate, dedicated to his lost Sweet Sixteen. He worked alone, mostly at night, and never let anyone watch him move the stones. He told the few people who asked that he "understood the laws of weight and leverage" and "knew the secrets of the people who built the pyramids." Some blocks weigh up to 30 tons — taller than Stonehenge megaliths and heavier than the heaviest in the Great Pyramid of Giza. In 1936 he heard a developer was building near his Florida City site. He hired a teenager with a truck for $10 a day, told the kid to come back for the next load, and moved every piece of Rock Gate ten miles north to Homestead. No one saw him load or unload. He spent three years rebuilding it on the new site. The result includes a 9-ton gate balanced on a steel shaft and ball bearings that pivots with the touch of one finger (it has lost some of its smoothness over the decades; the original has been replaced twice). A 25-foot Polaris telescope aligned to the latitude of the castle. A 20-foot-long, 13-ton stone table shaped like the state of Florida, surrounded by 25 stone rocking chairs (he intended one day to host the governor). A 5-ton rocking chair. A heart-shaped table dedicated to Agnes. An obelisk taller than the gate. A sundial accurate to within minutes, marking the equinoxes and solstices. In November 1951 he put a sign on the gate ("Going to the hospital"), took a bus to Miami, and died of pyelonephritis three days later. Hurricane Andrew (Cat 5, 1992, direct hit on Homestead) destroyed almost everything around Coral Castle and left the castle itself perfectly intact. The site has been a tourist attraction since 1953 and a National Register of Historic Places listing since 1984.
Marjory Stoneman Douglas called it 'a river of grass' — the Everglades is actually a 60-mile-wide, inches-deep river flowing imperceptibly south from Lake Okeechobee to Florida Bay. From the air, the sawgrass prairie stretches to every horizon, punctuated by tree islands (hammocks) and alligator holes. The contrast between the developed east coast and the wild Everglades is one of the most dramatic human/nature boundaries visible from any aircraft.