Most of the action in my Kurt Hunter Mystery Series takes place in Biscayne Bay, but my characters live in Miami. Miami, which is now referred to as Miami-Dade as it encompasses. From Fisher Island which has, at least according to Wikipedia, the highest per capita income in the US to Liberty City with one of the lowest there are plenty of unique locations.
For Backwater Squall, I chose the Venetian Islands, specifically San Marino Island.
There are no perfect lines in nature, which is why the islands in the picture look out of place. During the early 1900s, Miami was booming. Scams abounded with developers selling entire neighborhoods that were never built. The Everglades and Miami Beach were the two areas the developers focused on, and for entirely different reasons.
The developers started to fill the Everglades, essentially making something from nothing. “Drain the swamp” meant something different then. The result of their efforts altered the flow of water from Lake Okeechobee to Florida Bay, with the free-flowing Everglades being an integral component in the flow and filtering of the water. The environmental consequences are just now beginning to be undone.
Toward the Atlantic, and only ten miles away the development of Miami Beach suffered from the opposite problem—no land. To add land, the Venetian Islands were “created”.
The history of the man-made islands starts in 1913 with the construction of what was then called the Collins Bridge. At the time, built to connect Miami Beach to the mainland, the 2 1/2 mile wooden bridge was the longest in the world. Plans were in place for the island community, but they were thwarted by the 1926 Hurricane and the end of the 1920’s Florida land boom.
In 1925 construction to replace the wooden bridge with a series of arch draw bridges began. The Venetian Islands date back to this time. Though they are only about half of what was originally planned, the islands are one of the higher-priced neighborhoods in Miami.
Recently and coincidentally from my choice to use them in Backwater Squall the islands, or one that was never built have been in the news.
On February 3, 1926, Miami Herald: the first stakes were driven into Biscayne Bay for Isola di Lolando, a part of the failed Venetian Isles project which was later abandoned. The stakes still remain and Colin Foord, a marine biologist has plans to utilize the remains to aid the environment instead of hurt it.
"I want to create a mangrove maze that will be visible from space," declares Colin Foord, marine biologist and cofounder of the underwater media platform Coral Morphologic. "This project is more of a 21st-century approach of taking what was meant to be an artificial island and creating something that makes nature take over what was previously meant to be artificial."
Foord’s plan is to create a biological tourist attraction utilizing mangroves, sea sponges, seagrass, and oysters to create a natural labyrinth that will be equal parts art installation and practical seawall.