Gift Guide 2019
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The Florida Launchpad: Two days in Fort Lauderdale
Set along Florida’s southeastern edge, the city’s long-standing moniker, the “Venice of America” is not marketing flourish but geographic fact, shaped by an extensive canal system conceived in the early 1900s. Much of Fort Lauderdale’s waterways were dredged and engineered during the Florida land boom of the 1910s and 1920s, driven by developers such as Hugh Taylor Birch and later refined under the influence of visionaries including landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and planner John Nolen. Financed by northern capital and speculative investment, the canals were designed as much for drainage and flood control as for real estate value. Transforming swamp and mangrove into navigable frontage and embedding water…