Template:Wp-Fisher Island, Florida-History

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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 land developer, purchased the property from businessman and real estate developer Dana A. Dorsey, southern 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's death 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. During his subsequent presidency from 1968–1973, and during the Watergate scandal, Nixon maintained a home on nearby Key Biscayne known as the "Key Biscayne Whitehouse" that was the former residence of Senator Smathers and next door to Rebozo, but none of the three ever resided on Fisher Island.

The Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science (RSMAS) of 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. Boris Becker, 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 dispute this characterization, insisting that the island includes financially successful, compassionate people who have established several charitable activities on the island, provide health insurance to their employees and are involved in various arts organizations in the Miami-Dade area. The union argues that the wages provided by the island are too low for employees to care for their families and that the health insurance provided is 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 15-acre 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 16 October 2013 upheld in the US a previous 2010 judgement 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.