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Servants' Servants. Florida's new boom bears little resemblance to past periods of bubbling prosperity such as the '80s and '90s, when Oilman Henry Flagler opened up the new vacationland by building a string of hotels down the East Coast and a railroad that eventually reached Key West. It is also different from the '20s, when fun-seeking tycoons went south in private railroad cars with a staff of servants for the servants, and fell over each other to buy medieval houses and fake antique furniture from Addison Mizner. Gone are the hordes of "developers" who boomed land prices as high as $17,000 per frontage foot with dreams of billion-dollar cities, although they sometimes could not even afford the paper to plan them on.
Instead of paper plans, Florida bloomed last week with concrete results. From the white sands of Miami to the piney woods of the northwest panhandle, new industries formed the base of the new kind of boom.
Up north, in the state's financial center of Jacksonville, the red skeletons of two skyscrapers sprouted to provide office space for the Prudential and Independent life-insurance companies. Other cities had wooed them, but the companies chose Jacksonville for their southeastern headquarters because the state gives insurance companies tax advantages for locating regional offices in Florida. In turn, this law is making the city one of the nation's most important insurance centers. St. Regis Paper had opened a giant new $18 million plant; General Motors' Electro-Motive Division has nearly completed a $2,500,000 expansion to triple its capacity. General Foods had a new Maxwell House instant-coffee plant; International Harvester, a new $300,000 farm-equipment outlet.
"Hog 'n Hominy." Across the state to the west, in land long known as "hog 'n hominy country," Chemstrand's $85 million nylon plant at Pensacola was in commercial production, would soon be turning out 50 million Ibs. of yarn a year. Eight pulp and paper plants were producing at the rate of $230 million a year, having boosted capacity 50% in the past two years alone. Soon to go into production: an $18 million cellulose plant owned by Procter & Gamble.
Even such a resort center as Miami has its new industries, with small sportswear and light-metal plants fanning out into the suburbs. Miami's biggest employer (17,000) is International Airport, where Eastern Air Lines, National and Pan American all have their main repair and overhaul shops.