Fisher Island was separated from the barrier island which became Miami Beach in 1905, when
Government Cut was dredged across the northern end of the island. Construction of Fisher Island began in 1919 when
Carl G. Fisher, a wealthy land developer originally from
Indiana, purchased the property from businessman and real estate developer
Dana A. Dorsey, South Florida's first
African-American millionaire. In 1925,
William Kissam Vanderbilt II traded a luxury
yacht to Fisher for ownership of the island. After Vanderbilt died in 1944, ownership of the island passed to
U.S. Steel heir Edward Moore. Moore died in the early 1950s, and
Gar Wood, the millionaire inventor of hydraulic construction equipment, bought it. Wood, a speedboat enthusiast, kept the island a one-family retreat. In 1963, Wood sold to a development group that included local
Key Biscayne millionaire
Bebe Rebozo, Miami native and
United States Senator George Smathers, and then former U.S. Vice President
Richard Nixon, who had promised to leave politics. The
Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science at the
University of Miami maintained the Comparative Sedimentology Laboratory on Fisher Island from 1972 to 1990 under the leadership of Robert Ginsburg. After years of legal battles and changes in ownership, further development on the island was finally started in the 1980s, with architecture matching the original 1920s
Spanish style mansions. Although no longer a one-family island, in 2005, Fisher Island still remains somewhat inaccessible to the public and uninvited guests, and is as exclusive by modern standards as it was in the days of the Vanderbilts, providing similar refuge and retreat for its residents. The island contains
mansions, a hotel, several apartment buildings, an observatory, and a private
marina.
Julia Roberts,
Oprah Winfrey, and
Mel Brooks are among the
celebrities with homes on the island. In 2005, the island attempted to incorporate as a town, but the Miami-Dade County Commission did not support this initiative.
Controversies In 2006, the
Service Employees International Union began organizing the workers on Fisher Island in preparation for a petition for recognition as those employees' bargaining representative. The campaign culminated on June 15, 2007, with a march to the mainland ferry terminal that ended with a worker's arrest.
The New York Times wrote an exposé on the situation. In the article, residents were portrayed as not caring about the welfare of the community, but residents disputed this characterization, insisting that the island included financially successful, compassionate people who had established several charitable activities on the island, provided health insurance to their employees and were involved in various arts organizations in the Miami-Dade area. The union argued that the wages provided by the island were too low for employees to care for their families and that the health insurance provided was out of the reach of most island employees.
The Fisher Island bankruptcy case One of the last developable parcels of land on the island, a site approved for residential development facing the shipping channel that separates the island from Miami Beach, was for a number of years subject to a protracted legal battle between
Inna Gudavadze, the widow of the late
Georgian billionaire
Badri Patarkatsishvili, and investors aligned with his distant relative and former business associate, Joseph Kay. A judgment handed down by the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida on October 16, 2013, upheld in the US a previous 2010 judgment from the Supreme Court of
Gibraltar that comprehensively dismissed the "wholly unconvincing" case brought by Joseph Kay. The development then moved forward, under the supervision of Inna Gudavadze and the Patarkatsishvili family. ==Geography==