This is a New York Times video on Fisher Island, which is three miles off the coast of Miami and is home to the rich and powerful.
Self-study activity:
Watch the video and answer the questions about it. The activity is suitable for intermediate 2 students.
1 How big is the island?
2 What is special about it?
3 What brought about the current legal battle on the island?
4 What's the initiation fee for the club?
5 How many residents live on a permanent basis on the island?
6 What's unusual about the story of the cat?
7 Why is 1919 important?
8 What attracts international residents to the island?
9 What do residents on the island not want to share with you?
You can read a New York Times article on Fisher Island and the problems it is currently facing here.
Transcript:
We have our own bank, we have an aviary, we have our own zip code, and it’s like we have our own country here.
Three miles off the coast of Miami lies a 216-acre man-made island that has been long to the rich and powerful. Fisher Island is only accessible by boat and Oprah Winfrey, Mel Brookes, and tennis star Boris Becker have all owned homes here. But paradise isn’t always perfect. Following the sudden death of an Eastern European billionaire Fisher Island has been embroiled in a protracted legal battle that stalled all new developments on the island and is intruding on the seclusion and secrecy that its residents covet.
We don’t have any average people that come here. We are a private community, a private club, and when a resident purchases their apartment on Fisher Island the then go through the membership process approval.
There’s a $250,000 initiation fee for the club plus about $20,000 in annual dues on top of the condo and community association fees that can add up to more than $80,000 a year. For that, the island’s 132 permanent residents enjoy a permanent set of amenities, including a 24-hour marine patrol and a 50-man security team.
We’ve been a residential family for approximately 10 years. I was travelling one night and I received a phone call that our cat snuck out of the house, and within minutes we had 10 security guards on golf carts searching the whole island for the cat and security found our cat. I told my daughter that to remember the story when you’re older because it’s very unusual that you have security guards on golf carts looking for your cat nonetheless finding them. Safety is a perk of living on the island. Since there are no bridges you have to go through a security process, you take your car on a boat, on the ferry, you have to be cleared by a resident to get to the island. There are many factors to this that are very unusual.
The island became known as a playground for the wealthy after Karl Fisher, a notable Miami Beach developer, bought it in 1919. A few years later Fisher traded 7 acres of his land and with William K Vanderbilt II in exchange for a 250-foot yatch. Vanderbilt built a Mediterranean-style state then he acquired the rest of the island. Despite the current development battles, Fisher Island insularity is still a draw for some of the world’s ultra-wealthy. The demographics of the island is really interesting because so many international residents here right now they are from South America, Brazil, Mexico, Russia. They are so focused on having the kind of security that we have on the island here.
There’s a certain degree of secrecy and eccentricity I think on the island, people on the island-I’ve been there many times- don’t want to share with you who’s there, or who has been there or who might be there… It’s a very private place. That’s something the island’s residents won’t change, not as long as the ferry separates them from the main land.
On litigation I prefer not to comment that one of the keys is to keep Fisher Island as exclusive as private and as secure as we can.
