
Carl Fisher was energetic and colorful, a generous, domineering, daring audacious, profane, hard-drinking, practical-joker man’s man. His child bride, Jane, saw her future written on a leather pillow in his bachelor digs: “A woman is only a woman, a good cigar is a smoke.” He believed in middle- American values and conventions while routinely ignoring or defying them himself. He was innovative and instinctively entrepreneurial, pragmatic and brash, a sophisticated businessman and a social diamond in the rough. And he thrived on action. When Fisher was at the peak of his success in Miami Beach he started another resort in Montauk, Long Island.
Why, he was asked when you don’t need the money? Hell, he said, I just like to see the dirt fly. Fisher didn’t need the money when he began work on Miami Beach; he was already a multi-millionaire from the sale to Union Carbide of his Prest-o-Lite company, which manufactured a headlight that ran on compressed gas. But the challenge presented by Miami Beach, combined with the potential for profit, made the project irresistible. Promotion was a large part of the Beach’s success, something Fisher had an abundant talent for. As a teenager, he opened a bicycle repair shop – it was the beginning of the bicycle craze – and made a name for it by riding across a tightrope stretched between the two tallest buildings in town.
When automobiles came in, he publicized his dealership and became a kind of local cult hero by floating around the Indiana countryside in a stripped-down Stoddard-Dayton attached to a hot-air balloon. Spurred on by fellow automobile maniacs like Barney Oldfield and Louis Chevrolet, he used some of the profit from Prest-o-Lite to create the Indianapolis
Speedway in 1909 as a testing ground for the latest technology, later turning it into the country’s best-known racetrack. He was also a leader in the Good Roads movement. In 1913, seated behind the wheel of his Premier, Fisher blazed the way for the first transcontinental paved road, running from New York to San Francisco to publicize the need for highways and to test their building techniques. The Lincoln Highway – named after one of Fisher’s heroes – inspired other highway projects, including the north-south route Fisher undertook next.
At the time, Fisher was among the few people who could comprehend the deep effect the automobile would have on American life. He started work on the Dixie Highway almost immediately after he had begun developing the Miami Beach, in the foto the Fisher Casino in South Beach, because he knew that although only an elite owned cars at the time, many more people would be able to afford automobiles in the near future and that drivers would go anywhere a highway could take them.
Just as the cargo railroad had settled vast reaches of the United States – Florida, most recently – and the commuter rail had made once-exclusive seaside resorts like Coney Island and Atlantic City accessible to the nearby urban masses, highways would transform the American map as well as its way of life. Fisher was aware that he was following in the footsteps of Henry Flagler, the co-founder of Standard Oil with John D. Rockefeller, who had carved out his own domain in Florida. Flagler had first visited the state on a honeymoon to St. Augustine and Jacksonville with his young second wife in 1883. Although he was long retired, there was something about the place that stirred his entrepreneurial instincts.
He bought two railroads in northern Florida, formed the Florida East Coast Railway, and extended the line down the coast, reaching Key West just days before he died. Of course, providing a means of getting to Florida wasn’t enough – he had to build places for the tourists to stay, so grand that they would be reason enough to come down, and each of the major stops along the line acquired a huge resort hotel. It was, in fact, the first time that tourism was the industry that developed a new territory (although that is now standard in most developing countries).
In conclusion, Carl Fisher was a dude who lived life in the fast lane, pushing boundaries and breaking molds. From the glitz of Miami Beach to the roar of the Indianapolis Speedway, he was all about the action, the innovation, and the big splash. Money? Wasn’t always the motive. Fisher was driven by passion, vision, and straight-up thrill. And like the OG Florida pioneers before him, like Flagler with his epic train tracks, Fisher knew that to make a place pop, you needed both the destination and the journey. Whether it was cars, bikes, or massive resorts, Fisher wasn’t just about the here and now; he was paving the way for the future, seeing the ripple effects of each move on the grand American tapestry. In the end, he wasn’t just shaping cities or highways, but the very essence of American hustle and dream-chasing