[By Ellen Uguccioni · Photography by Al Diaz, Archival Image Courtesy Florida State Archives.]

The City of Coral Gables continues to reflect the inspired city planning ideals of its founders

Surrounded by the sprawling megalopolis of Greater Miami, the principally residential community of Coral Gables represents the most fully realized expression of a themed Twenties Boom-era suburb in Florida. Over 100 years ago the Reverend Solomon Merrick, a winter-weary Congregational minister from Massachusetts, determined to go south to the reinvigorating subtropics where he would establish a home for his family and create a retirement community for other clergymen. That decision would forever change the face of South Florida.

The Reverend Merrick, wife Althea and children made the journey to a 60-acre plot some five miles southwest of the frontier town of Miami, which had become incorporated just a year earlier in 1898. Reverend Merrick began a plantation on the acreage, where grapefruit and orange trees soon flourished. His oldest son, George Edgar Merrick, later wrote of his four-hour trips to the glistening shores of Biscayne Bay where as a boy he sold fruit from the back of a mule drawn cart to the wealthy patrons of Henry Flagler's Royal Palm Hotel.

In those years just before the turn of the 20th century, no one could have imagined the metamorphic changes that would transform the exotic community of Miami. The city was still difficult to reach, as the primary mode of transportation was by ship. Henry Flagler's railroad and the Model "T" would change all that. With the advent of the federal highway system, Miami's future was ensured.

While South Florida was growing, George Merrick was off to college. Early on, Merrick demonstrated a sensitivity and talent in writing, and was particularly enamored by poetry. However, his father was of a more practical mindset and sent him off to study law. In 1911, upon the death of the Reverend Merrick, George was called home to take care of the family business. George Merrick was not content with simply managing the plantation. With prodigious imagination and insight, Merrick envisioned the family groves transformed into a residential community, whose proximity to the City of Miami would provide an attractive suburb for citizens who worked in the growing town.

At age 23, Merrick began his real estate career by developing other residential suburbs in Miami. By 1916 Merrick had married the beautiful Eunice Peacock, the granddaughter of Coconut Grove pioneers Charles and Isabella Peacock. The two settled in a coral rock home designed by H. George Fink not Walter de Garmo on Coral Way very close to the home where Merrick spent his youth. Merrick used his real estate profits to acquire more and more land adjacent to the family plantation, and by 1921 his holdings totaled 3,000 acres. The scene was set for the creation of "Miami's Master Suburb."

Merrick possessed a genius of another kind in his ability to secure the finest design talents in the nation, whose like minds could turn his imaginative concepts into stone and concrete. Leading architects of the period were among the brilliant luminaries who were engaged to design the grand public buildings, palatial estates and modest bungalows as well as the community, institutional and religious buildings in the city. The team was completed with the skills of a nationally known landscape architect, Frank M. Button, and painter and illustrator Denman Fink, who became Merrick's "artistic advisor."

The first double page advertisement for Coral Gables appeared on November 14, 1921, in which Merrick wrote " ... the building of Coral Gables... a monument to the achievement of worthwhile perseverance in the creation of beauty and the bringing true of dreams." Starting with undeveloped land, the designers of the "City Beautiful" were able to create the kind of utopian community only dreamed of in the North's established urban centers. Every possible amenity was accommodated; areas were set out for a business center, recreational areas, educational facilities, and religious and community focal points. These elements were set to the theme of centuries-old Mediterranean architecture, a style that lent itself to the climate and to the aspirations of a man who dreamed of "Castles in Spain Made Real."

Huge dredges worked day and night to carve out the system of canals that snaked through the development, offering residents a waterside view and access to Biscayne Bay. Impressive entrance gates were set about the perimeter of the development announcing that the visitor had entered "Coral Gables: Miami's Riviera." With its canopied roadways, planted medians and generous swales along the roadway, it was as if the city was set into a vast garden. In a 1962 interview, Eunice Merrick said of her husband, "His original plan for the Gables was to be a botanical garden with flowering trees at all times."

Merrick's Coral Gables combined the picturesque with the pragmatic, and his autocratic control of the development insured its completion. In the hundreds of advertisements and promotional pieces for Coral Gables, the writer's hyperbolic style was never far from the reality. In 1927, a young Marjorie Stoneman Douglas wrote: "To drive about Coral Gables is constantly to be discovering new charms of roadways, new vistas of great distance, new tunnels of green which open out to light flooded plazas, new curving perspectives of trees and charming roofs and great lifts of sky."