"Since a boom is based on confidence, the local newspapers particularly emphasized the profits to be made by investors. A common story told of property reselling several times in a few week, doubling in price with each resale. The tales seemed endless. A lot increased in value $750 an hour when a buyer paid $11,000 for a onehundred- foot lot at three in the afternoon and resold it at five for $12,500. In Palm Beach a thirtytwo- acre tract purchased in 1916 for $76,000 sold in 1924 for $l million. Nine months later the same tract, subdivided into building lots, sold at auction for $1,757,647."

Source: Donald W. Curl, Mizner's Florida: American Resort Architecture (New York: Architectural History Foundation / Cambridge, Ma: - MIT Press, 1984).

Bust.

But by late 1925 the Florida boom was ending, impeded in part by cautionary articles in influential northern newspapers. The ardor of speculators and potential settlers...