- Historic Sites The Bubble In The Sun Under the Florida palms
William Jennings Bryan orated and Gilda Gray shimmied while
real-estate promoters hawked lots. It was the greatest land boom
in our history August 1965 | Volume 16, Issue 5 The impulse
which carried Theyre Hamilton Weigall into the Miami madness of
1925 was about as logical as that which carried anybody else
into it. An unemployed English newspaperman wandering the
streets of New York in the summer of that year, he was suddenly
stopped by a sign in a window announcing that there were
fortunes to be made in Florida real estate. “One Good Investment
Beats a Lifetime of Toil. Say! YOU can do what George Cusack,
Jr., did!” Cusack, Weigall judged from the accompanying photo,
was a little half-witted anyway. If he could make $500,ooo in
four weeks in Florida real estate, anybody could. When, a couple
of days later, Weigall stepped off a train into the blazing
August sunlight of a Miami afternoon, he felt as though he had
stepped into a tropical bedlam.