Early growth
Miami's growth up to World War II was astronomical:
During the early 1920s, the authorities in Miami allowed gambling and were very lax in regulating Prohibition, and so thousands of people migrated from the northern United States to the Miami region, creating a construction boom and building a skyline of high-rise buildings where none had existed before. Some early developments had to be razed ten years after their initial construction to make way for even larger buildings. A catastrophic hurricane in 1927, followed by the Great Depression, ended this boom.
In the mid-1930s, the Art Deco district of Miami Beach was developed.
During World War II, the U.S. government constructed many training, supply, and communications facilities around Miami, taking advantage of its strategic location at the southeastern corner of the country. Many servicemen and women returned to Miami after the war, pushing the population up to half a million by 1950.
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