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Mayor Levi pronounces his name lee-vie, is distressed when he hears it called lee-vee, regards his ancestry as Anglo-Saxon. He is friendlier to the Jewish influx than was Founder Fisher, whose companies' hotels still bar Jews.
John Levi actually looks as if his name should be Paddy O'Rourke. He also looks and lives like what he is: a well-off, semi-retired businessman who has softened with the easy years. But in his town's peculiar politics, he is as hard as a stonecrab.
A communal autocracy is his Miami Beach. Shy, able, $10,000-a-year City Manager Clyde Renshaw tends to the mechanics of city government. John Levi and a close little sodality of realty operators, builders, bankers, other local businessmen tend to politics. They comprise, employ, or otherwise control most-of the voting population (4,043 in 1932; 8,552 in 1939). And they perforce are tolerant realists, balancing and catering to the wants of the 200,000 winterbirds who flit in and away, the small but growing number who choose to dwell in Miami Beach.
Brothels are taboo in Miami Beach because 1) they are bad for the home trade, and 2) there are plenty just across the bay in Miami. Gambling flourished until 1936. Then Levi & Co. concluded that gambling racketeers were also bad for business, banged down the lid on everything except one legalized dog-track (which pays the city $50 a day during the season).
Unlike some who helped to build "the Beach," John Levi has not lost his sense of proportion. Says he: "They say Carl Fisher was the father of the beach, and that I am the son of the beach."
Journey to the Sun. Miami Beach is "the Beach" because a man named Carl Graham Fisher had imagination and $5,000,000. Carl Fisher was an Indiana Hoosier, and he was a humdinger. He made his first fortune in PrestOLite acetylene lamps for automobiles, sold out just as electric headlights were coming in. That was 1911, Carl Fisher was 37, and he was honing to play with his money. So he had the Seabury Shipyards in New York City build him a motor yacht, invited Seabury's Superintendent John H. Levi to go on the first cruise—down the Mississippi, through the Gulf and around Florida's tip. Also along were the first Mrs. Fisher (she got a Paris divorce in 1926), one Harry Bushman, and a Negro cook named William Galloway.
Christmas week in New Orleans, Friends Fisher & Levi got tight on Ramos gin fizzes (a drink that was new to them), pelted a policeman with a toy elephant, placated Mrs. Fisher with an armful of knickknacks. On the Gulf, after a day and a half of freezing storm, Pilot Levi headed for Mobile Bay, beached the boat. Cook Galloway leaped ashore. "I'm never going back on that boat again," he announced, and trudged off toward Mobile. Next day the Fishers and Bushman headed back for
Indianapolis, leaving John Levi to ship the boat from Mobile to Jacksonville. He cruised it around Florida, discovered that a metal lever had deflected his compass, got sadly lost. But eventually he found his way through the Florida Keys (with a native fisherman's help), moored in Biscayne Bay in January, 1912. One long look at those blue waters and the hamlet on the shore was enough for him. He wired Carl Fisher: "Meet me in Miami ... a pretty little town."