Facet Block Injection in Buena Vista, FL

In the 1890s, Buena Vista was a small village whose founding and growth paralleled Miami’s. During the Land Boom of the 1920s, the area was developed as the Biltmore and Shadowlawn subdivisions. Originally home to many Florida cracker immigrants from Georgia and North Carolina, the neighborhood soon became popular with the owners of nearby businesses. The houses reflect their original owners’ rising social status and include fine examples of Mediterranean Revival, , Craftsman, and Art Deco architecture style residences.

Buena Vista, Lemon City, and Little River were founded before the turn of the 19th-century and represent some of the earliest settlements in Miami-Dade County. The area known as Buena Vista was once a small village adjoining, but not within the corporate limits of Miami proper. Although preceded in age by pioneer Lemon City, a town located a little further north, the small village of Buena Vista dates its birth, development, and growth along with Miami’s. The founding of Buena Vista dates back to the days when the immense rock ridge extending between the Atlantic Ocean and the Florida Everglades was covered by a dense pine forest. The earliest history of the village is recorded in a survey made by government surveyors, and the locations of ht eland tracts are to this date still founded on this early document.

Northwestward aerial of the FEC Buena Vista yard in 1928, now the Midtown Miami development.

The land which became Buena Vista was originally part of the homesteads of William Henry Gleason and E.L. White. Gleason, a prominent and somewhat notorious figure in early Miami-Dade County politics, arrived in Miami after the Civil War was elected Lieutenant Governor of Florida. He left the area in 1876 but retained his homestead for several years, eventually turning it over to his son. As early as 1892, E.L. White homesteaded the area from North 41st Street to 54th Street between West 2nd Avenue and East 2nd Avenue. This was the area from which the Biltmore and Shadowlawn Subdivisions, which today make up the “Buena Vista East Historic District”, were carved in the early 1920s.

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