Islandia, A Florida City That Never Was

The New York Times covered this funny little piece of Florida history yesterday. Islandia was supposed to be a giant resort town built on an archipelago in the Florida Keys, but environmentalists saved it from development. Worth the read!

Once a hideout for pirates, the 33 northernmost islands are now one of the Florida Keys’ last unspoiled pockets, bypassed in the early 1900s by Henry Flagler’s Overseas Railroad to Key West and the Overseas Highway.

Back in 1960, the conservationists sought to protect the islands from the proposed construction of a nearby oil refinery and seaport and also from grand plans to blanket tiny, seven-mile Elliott Key in luxury hotels, shopping centers and beachfront homes. Thirteen of the islands’ 18 registered voters, all of them landowners who wanted development, cast ballots (in a ballot box ferried by boat) to incorporate Islandia, as they called it. Incorporation, they figured, was a sure way to skirt state and federal zoning rules and to secure a causeway that would cross the bay from the mainland.

Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, Democratic Congressman Dante B. Fascell, and millionaire Herbert Hoover Jr. all got involved in the effort to preserve Elliott Key and the surrounding islands. In October 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed a bill to preserve much of Islandia as a national monument, which later become Biscayne National Park.

Florida’s oldest, biggest cypress tree dies

Known as The Senator, this bald cypress was estimated to be 3,500 years old, 118 feet tall and 17 1/2 feet in circumference. It was probably the oldest tree of its kind in North America.

In Spring Hammock near Longwood, Florida, the Senator towered over surrounding trees. Early Monday morning, a resident called 911 to report a visible fire near Big Tree Park, where the infamous cypress was located.

By the time firefighters arrived, it was too late to save the tree. The Senator is now nothing more than a burnt stump. The picture shows two men posing with the tree in the 1920s. I didn’t even know this existed, and now I wish I had seen this tree before it burned down! What a sad end.

[Source: Tampa Bay Times]

How to Dissolve a Nobel Prize

It’s 1940. The Nazis have taken Copenhagen. They are literally marching through the streets, and physicist Niels Bohr has just hours, maybe minutes, to make two Nobel Prize medals disappear.

These medals are made of 23-karat gold. They are heavy to handle, and being shiny and inscribed, they are noticeable. The Nazis have declared no gold shall leave Germany, but two Nobel laureates, one of Jewish descent, the other an opponent of the National Socialists, have quietly sent their medals to Bohr’s Institute of Theoretical Physics, for protection. Their act is probably a capital offense — if the Gestapo can find the evidence…

I highly recommend reading the rest of this wonderful (and true!) story on NPR’s website. Articles like this remind me why science is so cool.

Happy Constitution Day!