Hartford purchased Hog Island from Swedish industrialist Axel Wenner-Gren in 1960 and immediately began erasing every trace of the island's humble past. He hired Palm Beach architect John Volk to design the Ocean Club, Cafe Martinique, Hurricane Hole, and a golf course. He brought in Gary Player as golf pro and Pancho Gonzales as tennis pro, names that signaled his ambitions. Most remarkably, he acquired the Cloisters, the remains of a fourteenth-century Augustinian monastery from Montrejeau, France, originally purchased and dismantled by William Randolph Hearst in the 1920s. Hartford had the stones shipped to the Bahamas and reassembled on a hilltop overlooking Nassau Harbour. A medieval French monastery rebuilt on a Caribbean island by a grocery store heir: the gesture captured Hartford's entire approach to Paradise Island, grand to the point of surreal. Newsweek and Time both covered the 1962 opening. Paradise Beach appeared on Bahamian three-dollar notes in 1966.

Hartford's paradise attracted gamblers as well as sunbathers. He obtained a gambling license for the island and brought in James M. Crosby as an investor, a connection made through Hartford's bodyguard at the Colony Club in Palm Beach. Crosby and partner Jack Davis formed Resorts International and took over the island's development, shifting its identity from exclusive retreat to casino destination. What followed was a chain of sales that read like a high-stakes card game. Paradise Island sold in the 1980s for $79 million, then went to television host Merv Griffin for $400 million, and finally to South African hotel magnate Sol Kerzner for $125 million. Each owner reshaped the island in their image. Kerzner built the Atlantis resort, whose pink Royal Towers now dominate the Nassau skyline and house the Bridge Suite, one of the most expensive hotel rooms in the world at $25,000 per night.

For a decade, Paradise Island had its own airport. A seaplane base had served the resort for years, but in 1989 a three-thousand-foot runway was added, bringing STOL-capable de Havilland Dash 7 turboprops operated by Paradise Island Airlines and Grumman Mallard amphibians flown by Chalk's International Airlines. US Airways Express ran flights from Fort Lauderdale. The airport codes were PID and MYPI (ICAO). By 1999, the airstrip closed. The runway was torn up and replaced by an eighteen-hole luxury golf course surrounded by some of the island's wealthiest properties, an area now called the Ocean Club where homes list for as much as $40 million. Few transformations capture Paradise Island's character so neatly: a runway built for convenience, removed for exclusivity, its asphalt traded for manicured fairways and oceanfront estates.

Hollywood discovered Paradise Island early. The Beatles filmed scenes for Help! here in 1965, the same year Sean Connery shot underwater sequences for the James Bond film Thunderball in the surrounding waters. Casino Royale returned to the island four decades later in 2006. The island has appeared in films from My Father the Hero to After the Sunset, and reality television made its mark when Survivor: All-Stars contestants Rob Mariano and Amber Brkich married here in a televised ceremony. The island's appeal to filmmakers is the same quality Hartford identified in 1959: it looks like a fantasy of the tropics, close enough to the United States to reach easily but exotic enough to feel like another world. That combination has made it one of the most filmed locations in the Caribbean.

Paradise Island connects to New Providence by two bridges spanning Nassau Harbour. The first was built in 1966 by Resorts International; the second followed in the late 1990s to handle growing traffic. Standing on either bridge, you look down at water so clear you can count the fish. To the south, Nassau's waterfront stretches along Bay Street with its pastel buildings and straw market stalls. To the north, the Atlantis towers rise behind white sand beaches, and somewhere on a hilltop the Cloisters sit in their improbable Caribbean exile. The whole island covers just 685 acres, barely more than a square mile, yet it contains a medieval monastery, a defunct airport turned golf course, one of the world's most expensive hotel suites, and enough film history to fill a retrospective. Hog Island earned its new name not through any natural paradise but through sheer human insistence that it become one.