Montauk: Miami of the North

This view of Montauk, looking west, was taken around 1930 by commercial photographer Charles Duprez. At the time, the community at the far tip of Long Island was in the midst of development fever, which began in 1926 with the arrival of Carl Graham Fisher, an entrepreneur who had created Miami out of mangrove swamps and woods in the early 1920s. Fisher envisioned Montauk as the ``Miami of the North'' and built the seven-story office tower (top photo) to serve as his headquarters. But the stock market crash of 1929 hit Fisher hard, and he went bankrupt in 1932.