Brickell Key is a man-made island off the mainland Brickell neighborhood in  Miami. Also called Claughton Island, the history of Brickell Key real estate can be traced to 1896, when Miami pioneer Henry Flagler had a 9-foot (2.7 m) deep channel dug from the mouth of the Miami River. In the process, Mr. Flagler created an off-shore property composed of two small islands. In 1943, a real estate investor, Edward N. Claughton, Sr. acquired the Brickell Key islands and eventually purchased additional bay bottom land to combine them to a 44-acre (180,000 m2) triangle-shaped tract separated from Brickell and Brickell Avenue by only a few hundred feet of water.

In the late 1970s, Swire Properties purchased most of the island real estate property from the Claughton, and began to put into place a master plan that would ultimately transform it into one of the most distinctive island communities in the world.