No road or causeway connects to the island, which is only accessible by private boat, helicopter, or ferry.

[7] Construction of Fisher Island began in 1919 when Carl G. Fisher, a wealthy land developer originally from Indiana, purchased the property from businessman and real estate developer Dana A. Dorsey, South Florida's first African-American millionaire.

In 1925, William Kissam Vanderbilt II traded a luxury yacht to Fisher for ownership of the island.

Moore died in the early 1950s, and Gar Wood, the millionaire inventor of hydraulic construction equipment, bought it.

In 1963, Wood sold to a development group that included local Key Biscayne millionaire Bebe Rebozo, Miami native and United States Senator George Smathers, and then former U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon, who had promised to leave politics.

The Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science at the University of Miami maintained the Comparative Sedimentology Laboratory on Fisher Island from 1972 to 1990 under the leadership of Robert Ginsburg.

After years of legal battles and changes in ownership, further development on the island was finally started in the 1980s, with architecture matching the original 1920s Spanish style mansions.

The campaign culminated on June 15, 2007, with a march to the mainland ferry terminal that ended with a worker's arrest.

[11] In the article, residents were portrayed as not caring about the welfare of the community, but residents disputed this characterization, insisting that the island included financially successful, compassionate people who had established several charitable activities on the island, provided health insurance to their employees and were involved in various arts organizations in the Miami-Dade area.

[citation needed] One of the last developable parcels of land on the island, a 15-acre (6.1 ha) site approved for residential development facing the shipping channel that separates the island from Miami Beach, was for a number of years subject to a protracted legal battle between Inna Gudavadze, the widow of the late Georgian billionaire Badri Patarkatsishvili, and investors aligned with his distant relative and former business associate, Joseph Kay.

[12] A judgment handed down by the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida[13] on October 16, 2013, upheld in the US a previous 2010 judgment from the Supreme Court of Gibraltar that comprehensively dismissed the "wholly unconvincing" case brought by Joseph Kay.

The entire island has a total area of 0.362 sq mi (0.94 km2), of which 0.267 square miles (0.69 km2) are within the census-designated place(CDP),[1] the rest being part of the city of Miami Beach.