There's a place in Florida whose monumental place in U.
S.
history didn't save it from the wrecking ball.
On Key Biscayne, a quiet barrier island off Miami, the Watergate breakin was planned, or at least discussed, at President Richard M.
Nixon's compound, the winter White House.
It was a discussion that would lead to the resignation of a president in disgrace.
How could any American alive at the time forget Nixon saying in an Orlando speech, 'I am not a crook'? In 1969, Nixon bought three waterfront homes in this place in Florida to be close to his friend and confidante, Bebe Rebozo, and industrialist Robert Abplanalp, inventor of the modern spray can valve.
Rebozo, owner of Key Biscayne Bank, was indicted for laundering a $100,000 gift from Howard Hughes to the Nixon election effort.
As Watergate unfolded, Nixon spent more time in seclusion at his Key Biscayne compound, visiting there more than 50 times between 1969 and 1973.
Nixon later sold the property, and it was razed in 2004.
Key Biscayne is quiet because most of it is parkland.
On the north end, there's Crandon County Park.
On the south, there are the Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park and Biscayne National Park, one of two in Miami-Dade County.
In the middle lies the Village of Key Biscayne (pop.
10,000-plus), one of Miami-Dade's newer municipalities, incorporated in 1991.
Sixty per cent of its residents - businessmen and professionals - speak mostly Spanish.
Towering over the south end of Key Biscayne is the 95-foot Cape Florida Lighthouse, built in 1825 and rebuilt in 1855-56 after Seminole Indians burned it resisting deportation from Florida to the West.
It's in the state park.
A predecessor of this lighthouse was built in an effort to prevent the wrecking of ships on the Florida Reef.
Coconuts, pineapples and other tropical fruits figure prominently in the island's history.
You know those old World War II South Pacific movies you watch on the History Channel? At least one, 'They Were Expendable', was shot mostly on Key Biscayne, a stand-in for the Philippines.
Before 1947, you needed a boat to get to this place in Florida.
Credit Charles Crandon and Ed Ball for building the first road to the key - Rickenbacker Causeway, named for the World War II flying ace and founder of Miami's Eastern Airlines.
Nixon is gone.
His compound is gone.
And Watergate is gone.
All have taken their place on the pages of U.
S.
history.