49 Fun Facts About Miami

Who is remembered as the 'Mother of Miami', the only woman to found a major US city?

Julia Tuttle bought the riverfront land the city grew on, then gave away hundreds of acres of it to lure a railroad south. The first train arrived in 1896, and she died just two years later.

Which railroad tycoon did Miami's founder persuade to extend his Florida East Coast Railway to the city?

Henry Flagler, a co-founder of Standard Oil, agreed after the freezes of 1894-95 wrecked crops across Florida but never reached Miami. In return he took hundreds of acres of prime land.

Which Miami neighbourhood began as 'Colored Town', where deeds confined the city's Black residents?

Overtown grew into the hub of Black business and nightlife in the segregated city. It declined from the 1960s, when new expressways were driven straight through the heart of the neighbourhood.

Miami's name is thought to come from 'Mayaimi', a name Spaniards recorded in the 1500s for which body of water?

Lake Okeechobee: a shipwrecked Spaniard who spent 17 years among Florida's tribes wrote the name down in his memoir around 1575. It is thought to have passed to the Miami River and then the city.

Miami's nickname 'The Magic City' came from what?

Its astonishingly fast growth: a settlement of a few hundred voters at incorporation held more than 110,000 residents by the 1930 census. Winter visitors are said to have called the change from one season to the next magic.

Which singer joined a wedding band called the Miami Latin Boys, which was soon renamed Miami Sound Machine?

Gloria Estefan had fled Cuba with her family as a toddler. In 1975 bandleader Emilio Estefan heard her sing at a wedding his group was playing and asked her to sit in, and they married in 1978.

Which street is the heart of Little Havana, and lends its name to a March festival?

Calle Ocho is Spanish for Eighth Street, the local name for SW 8th Street. Cuban exiles started its festival in 1978 to show their culture to the rest of South Florida, and it now fills 15 blocks.

In 1988 Little Havana's big March street festival set a Guinness World Record for what?

Longest conga line: 119,986 people joined it, not long after local band Miami Sound Machine took 'Conga' into the US top ten. The festival is run by the Kiwanis Club of Little Havana.

Which game do the regulars play all day at Máximo Gómez Park, giving the Little Havana landmark its nickname?

Dominoes games have run there since the early 1970s, over Cuban coffee and cigars. Locals simply call it Domino Park, not by the name of the Cuban independence general it honours.

Which Miami landmark, modelled on Seville's Giralda, was built in 1925 as a newspaper headquarters?

Freedom Tower housed the Miami News until 1957. From 1962 to 1974 the federal government ran its Cuban refugee centre there, which earned the building its nickname, the 'Ellis Island of the South'.

About 125,000 Cubans reached Florida in a 1980 boatlift named after which Cuban port?

Mariel became the exit after some 10,000 Cubans crowded into Peru's embassy in Havana seeking asylum. Fidel Castro then announced that anyone who wanted to leave could go, and boats from Florida came for them.

Which film follows a Cuban refugee's bloody rise through Miami's 1980s cocaine trade?

Scarface was meant to be shot entirely in Miami, but local objections to the way it showed the city and its Cuban exiles drove most of the production to Los Angeles.

Miami Vice's Sonny Crockett lived on a sailboat with a pet alligator named what?

Elvis shared the boat with Don Johnson's detective. Crockett's Ferrari Daytona was really a rebodied Corvette, and once Ferrari objected and supplied two real Testarossas, the fake was blown up on screen.

By a much-repeated story, NBC's Brandon Tartikoff pitched Miami Vice with a two-word memo reading what?

MTV cops is the legend, but creator Anthony Yerkovich calls it ridiculous and says Tartikoff began telling it over a year after the pitch. His idea grew from laws letting police seize drug dealers' property.

The executive producer of NBC's Miami Vice imposed which rule on the show's look?

No earth tones: Michael Mann kept reds and browns off screen, so when a script called for a Mercedes, the crew would offer him a white, a black or a silver one. The first season drew 15 Emmy nominations.

Which director made his feature debut with Bad Boys, the 1995 buddy-cop film set in Miami?

Michael Bay was directing adverts, including the first Got Milk commercial, when producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer hired him. The script had first been developed for comedians Dana Carvey and Jon Lovitz.

Which rapper's 1998 hit 'Miami' is built on a sample of The Whispers' 'And the Beat Goes On'?

Will Smith's producers wanted a Spanish speaker to say 'Bienvenidos a Miami', so one of them went down to the street outside the studio and asked passers-by until a woman agreed to come up and record it.

Miami's Ultra Music Festival takes its name from a 1997 album by which band?

Depeche Mode's album Ultra gave the festival its name. Its first edition, a 1999 beach party in Miami Beach, drew about 10,000 people and still lost its founders thousands of dollars.

Ted Arison, the Miami Heat's first owner, made his fortune founding which cruise line?

Carnival, which Arison launched after falling out with his partner in an earlier line. His basketball team began less smoothly: it lost its first 17 games, then the worst start in NBA history.

Where did LeBron James say he was taking his talents?

South Beach is actually across the bay in the separate city of Miami Beach, while the Heat play in downtown Miami. James delivered all the same: the team won NBA titles in 2012 and 2013, after its first in 2006.

Which coach led the Miami Dolphins through a perfect 17-0 season in 1972?

Don Shula's team won all 17 games, the last of them Super Bowl VII, even though quarterback Bob Griese broke his ankle in week five and 38-year-old backup Earl Morrall had to start most of the season.

Which comedian, the founder of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, was also a founding owner of the Miami Dolphins?

Danny Thomas and lawyer Joe Robbie were awarded the AFL expansion franchise in 1965 for $7.5 million. Thomas sold his share soon afterwards, and Robbie went on running the team until 1990.

The Marlins took the World Series in 1997 and 2003 despite never having done what?

Won a division title: both champions finished well behind Atlanta and got in as wild cards. After the 1997 win the owner sold off the stars, and the defending champions lost 108 games the next season.

The Marlins' ballpark in Little Havana stands on the site of which demolished stadium?

The Miami Orange Bowl hosted five Super Bowls and 70 years of University of Miami football. It was pulled down in 2008, once the Hurricanes had left to share the Dolphins' stadium in the suburbs.

Inter Miami's first major trophy, won weeks after Lionel Messi's 2023 debut, was what?

The Leagues Cup: Miami sat bottom of MLS's Eastern Conference when Messi arrived, yet he finished as the tournament's top scorer and the final, away to Nashville, was won 10-9 on penalties.

As of 2024, PortMiami held which title among the world's ports?

Busiest cruise port: more than 8.2 million cruise passengers passed through it in 2024. A tunnel under the bay opened in 2014 to keep the port's trucks and cruise traffic off downtown streets.

In 2002 the fare on Miami's Metromover, the elevated people mover through downtown, was changed to what?

Nothing: the 25-cent fare was dropped when voters approved a transit sales tax, partly because collecting the coins cost almost as much as they brought in. The ride has stayed free ever since.

Which road is the north-south baseline of Miami's street grid, dividing addresses into east and west?

Miami Ave, known as Avenue D in the city's first years, splits east from west. Because the grid's origin sits downtown beside the bay, the two western quadrants are far larger than the eastern ones.

Miami's only recorded snow flurries fell the day before which president's 1977 inauguration?

Jimmy Carter was sworn in on January 20, 1977, the day after the flurries. The same cold wave carried wet snow as far south as Homestead and did heavy damage to Florida's citrus and winter vegetables.

Which porous rock forms the bedrock beneath Miami, laid down when a shallow sea covered the area?

Limestone, known locally as Miami oolite, built up from tiny grains of calcium carbonate about 130,000 years ago. It is so permeable that the rock itself holds the aquifer supplying most of the region's drinking water.

After Hurricane Andrew flattened Homestead in 1992, Florida brought in some of America's strictest what?

Building codes were rewritten after engineers surveying the wreckage found roof shingles that had been stapled on and tiles merely glued to felt paper, both easily torn away by the wind.

Hurricane Andrew, which devastated the area south of Miami, was the costliest US hurricane until which 2005 storm surpassed it?

Katrina took the record 13 years after Andrew's $27 billion of damage. Andrew's claims had already bankrupted 11 insurance companies, leaving more than 900,000 Florida policyholders without cover.

Which bayfront Miami estate did farm-machinery heir James Deering build as an Italian Renaissance-style winter home?

Vizcaya was Deering's winter home from 1916 until his death in 1925. His heirs later sold the villa and gardens to the county for $1 million and gave it the furnishings, so it could open as a museum.

George Merrick planned which Mediterranean-style city beside Miami in the 1920s, giving land for the University of Miami?

Coral Gables made Merrick rich only briefly. The 1926 hurricane and the collapse of the land boom left him deep in debt, and he ended his working life as the county's postmaster.

Miami Beach's Art Deco hotels, built mostly in the 1930s, face Lummus Park along which street?

Ocean Drive's hotels were long neglected when local preservationists formed a league in 1976 to save them. Three years later they had won the district a place on the National Register, and new investment followed.

Which Indianapolis millionaire paid to finish the wooden Collins Bridge in 1913 in return for land that became Miami Beach?

Carl Fisher had made his money in car headlights and built the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. He turned the swampy island into a resort, then lost his fortune when the land boom collapsed and ended up living there in a small cottage.

Which fashion designer was shot dead outside his Miami Beach mansion, Casa Casuarina, in July 1997?

Gianni Versace had walked out to buy magazines and was climbing his front steps when Andrew Cunanan shot him. Eight days later the killer was found dead on a houseboat a few miles up the beach.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas's 1947 book gave the Everglades which enduring nickname?

River of Grass exists because Douglas had been asked to write a book on the Miami River, found it too small to bother with and talked her publisher into the Everglades instead. The first printing sold out in a month.

In 1997 voters added 'Miami' to the front of which Florida county's name?

Dade County was about to be called Pinckney County in 1836 when news arrived that Major Francis Dade had died in a Seminole ambush, and legislators swapped the name. Voters added Miami for its worldwide fame.

Which airline runs its main hub for flights to the Caribbean and points south out of Miami International Airport?

American built its Miami hub on a local rival's ruin. It set up a base in 1988 as Eastern Air Lines, long the dominant carrier there, was sliding into bankruptcy, then took over many of Eastern's routes south.

Which Miami neighbourhood, a town of its own until 1925, has City Hall in a former Pan Am seaplane terminal?

Coconut Grove is the city's oldest continuously inhabited neighbourhood. Bahamian immigrants built many of its early landmarks, and it ran its own affairs until Miami annexed it.

Which former warehouse district north of downtown Miami became an open-air gallery of murals and street art?

Wynwood changed in 2009, when developer Tony Goldman invited street artists to paint the blank walls of warehouses he had bought. The Wynwood Walls that resulted now draw millions of visitors a year.

Brickell Avenue in Miami is known for one of the largest US concentrations of what?

International banks moved in as office towers rose along the avenue from the 1970s. They replaced the lavish mansions that had earned it an earlier nickname, Millionaire's Row.

The Overseas Railroad, completed in 1912, carried trains from Miami across miles of open water to which terminus?

Key West got its trains in 1912, after seven years of building through three hurricanes. Another, on Labor Day 1935, wrecked the line for good, and its surviving bridges were turned into the Overseas Highway.

Which seafood, served chilled with mustard sauce, made a Miami Beach restaurant called Joe's famous?

Stone crab claws are twisted off and the crab goes back in the sea alive, where it can grow new ones. Joe Weiss opened his lunch counter in 1913, having moved south on doctors' orders for his asthma.

When Miami counted just 1,681 residents at the 1900 census, which city was Florida's largest?

Jacksonville had about 28,000 people in 1900. Miami had passed it by 1950, with nearly 250,000, and stayed ahead until Jacksonville merged with its whole county in 1968.

PortMiami's cruise terminals sit on which combined landmass in Biscayne Bay?

Dodge Island was built up with dredged fill in the 1960s until it had swallowed its neighbours, Lummus and Sam's islands. The whole port then moved out to it from the downtown waterfront.

Which Miami-born rapper calls himself 'Mr. 305' after the city's telephone area code?

Pitbull, born Armando Pérez, took his stage name from a dog he admired for being 'too stupid to lose' a fight. He learned to perform early: his father had him recite poetry to the customers in bars.

Which fair for collectors and galleries, founded in a European city, has held a December edition in Miami Beach since 2002?

Art Basel had planned its first Miami Beach edition for December 2001 and called it off after the September 11 attacks. Local collectors had lobbied the Swiss organisers to make the city a stop on the art circuit.