Caribbean Club on Key Largo, northernmost of the Florida Keys, was developed and built by auto parts and real estate promoter Carl Graham Fisher in 1938.
Carl Fisher, considered a genius as a promoter, had conceived the Lincoln Highway, the first road across America, in 1913. Fisher had helped develop the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and Miami Beach and had at one time been worth an estimated $100 million. He lost his fortune in the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. The losses in his real estate ventures left Fisher virtually penniless. Always a man whose lifeblood seemed to be new dreams and projects, by the mid 1930s, he was living in a small cottage on Miami Beach and received a US$500 per month salary from his former partners to do promotional work.
Shortly before his death, in what turned out to be his last project, Fisher developed the Caribbean Club on Key Largo as a fishing club for men of modest means, "a poor man's retreat." Fisher would probably have appreciated the value, about 8 years after his death, of the Caribbean Club becoming famous as an "on location" filming site for the 1947 film Key Largo starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. This is likely tourist hype as Warner Brothers filmed 99% of the movie (except for the opening aerial shots) on soundstages and backlots in Hollywood. Watching the film, it's obvious it's on a soundstage.
The Caribbean Club has been owned by the Whitehust family for two generations now. It serves as the local watering hole.
Famous quotes containing the words caribbean and/or club:
“It is a curious thing to be a woman in the Caribbean after you have been a woman in these United States.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“Mi advise tu them who are about tu begin, in arnest, the jurney ov life, is tu take their harte in one hand and a club in the other.”
—Josh Billings [Henry Wheeler Shaw] (1818–1885)