Gregory Potemkin served under Catherine the Great. Potemkin Villages! (Fake cities...)
Cyrus Potemkin is his great great grandson, a dubious real estate developer in Florida in 1922.
Tell us the tale of Cyrus.
Ah, yes — Cyrus Potemkin, the sunburned specter of a glorious lineage, cast adrift in the swamplands of Florida during the real estate mania of 1922.
The Tale of Cyrus Potemkin: Scion of Illusion
Cyrus Aleksandrovich Potemkin liked to suggest—but never quite confirm—that he was the great-great-grandson of Prince Grigory Potemkin, the legendary statesman, lover of Catherine the Great, and originator (supposedly) of the “Potemkin Village.” In truth, Cyrus was more likely descended from a Odessa barkeep with a taste for embroidered stories and stolen candlesticks. But this did not deter him. If the Potemkin name was built on façades, Cyrus would simply modernize the blueprint.
Setting the Stage: Florida, 1922
Florida in the early 1920s was a fever dream — land, land, land! The newspapers brimmed with headlines like “Tampa Will Surpass London by 1930!” and “Invest Now Before the Everglades Are All Gone!” Speculators rode railcars from Ohio and steamships from New York, their pockets full of ambition and their necks poorly acclimated to the sun.
Enter Cyrus Potemkin, real estate visionary, impresario, and full-time illusionist.
He arrived in Palm Beach wearing a linen suit several shades too white and carrying a walking stick he never needed but loved to point with. He founded the Imperial Atlantic Development Company, promising a string of Mediterranean-style resorts along the Intracoastal Waterway — a project he dubbed “The Riviera of the New World.” The brochures were lavish. They featured domes, spires, fountains, and women in diaphanous gowns feeding flamingos.
The Villages Themselves
Naturally, the resorts did not exist.
Cyrus hired local carpenters to build half-walls and facades propped up by 2x4s. “Nothing wrong with a little theater,” he said. On the day of investor visits, he paid college boys to wear togas and parade as “Roman bathers.” Jazz quartets played behind screens to lend the illusion of bustling cocktail lounges. Palm trees were wheeled in by donkey cart and wheeled out after dusk.
One infamous model home was built with only three sides. A confused investor tried to walk around it and was diverted by a man pretending to have a heatstroke.
The Cracks Appear
The ruse worked — at first. Cyrus sold parcels of swampy, mosquito-infested land at a furious pace. He hosted galas in tented dance halls and always toasted to his ancestor Grigory. He coined the phrase “a noble past, a tropical future”, and had it painted on the side of a Model T that drove in circles around Miami Beach, blaring a Victrola speaker out the window.
But then — the rains came.
The rainy season exposed his lots as little more than knee-deep puddles with wooden stakes in them. The jazz quartets went unpaid. One investor accidentally walked into the back of a false colonnade and broke his nose.
By late 1925, the Florida land boom began to collapse. Cyrus fled under cover of night aboard a shrimping boat headed for Havana, clutching a suitcase full of bearer bonds and an unpaid bill from the Hotel Delano.
Legacy
Cyrus Potemkin vanished into lore, leaving behind a single street still bearing his name — Potemkin Promenade — which leads nowhere and ends in a mangrove thicket.
Some say he died penniless in a Cuban poker den. Others claim he reinvented himself in California as “Count Silvano du Marais,” selling moonshine out of a converted firetruck.
But ask any old-timer in Palm Beach, and they’ll tell you: “Cyrus? Oh, he didn’t sell land. He sold the idea of land. And that, my friend, is a rare gift.”
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