The Costs of Leisure in South Florida
When Champlain Towers South Associates, a Toronto-based real estate partnership led by Nathan Reiber, erected a thirteen-story condominium tower at 8777 Collins Avenue in Surfside, Florida, in 1980 and 1981, Reiber and his partners were riding a wave. Condominium construction in Miami-Dade was booming; the Miami Herald reported close to a hundred projects underway in the county in the fall of 1980 alone.[1] Champlain Towers South was but one of a string of high-rises built to appeal to retirees and seasonal snowbirds, mainly from northern U.S. cities, and, increasingly, professionals from Europe and South America, all seeking a leisure lifestyle along the Florida Atlantic coast (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Advertisement for Champlain Towers South, Miami Herald, July 20, 1980, 24H.
Yet this condo wave was also part of a longer history of leisure building in the Sunshine State. With roots in the late nineteenth century, the leisure housing market exploded after World War II along both the east and west coasts of the state, particularly in its southern half. Here, ambitious builders and developers marketed housing to vacationers and retirees with growing levels of disposable income. Lest we think of this as solely a luxury market (though there was that in places such as Naples and Palm Beach), most of this boom specifically targeted middle-class clients, wooing them with cheap single-family house lots priced, by the late 1950s and early 1960s, as low as $10/down and $10/month (Figure 2), and, as Matthew Lasner writes in High Life, apartments for as little as $7,000 to $15,000, depending on the location.
Figure 2. Advertisement for Mackle lots, Life, January 20, 1958.
Whatever combination of factors led to the catastrophic structural failure at Champlain Towers South, it prompts consideration of vulnerabilities and hazards in this landscape of leisure. While at present we struggle to make sense of the tragedy, there are other less visceral and immediate, but also important, costs that come with building the condominiums, vacation and retirement houses and subdivisions, and resort hotels that comprise the South Florida cultural landscape. Examining Champlain Towers South in this context will not answer the question that we all want to know—precisely how it collapsed—but considering the broader history of building for a leisure market can help us balance our craving for landscapes of leisure with the human and environmental toll this kind of development exacts.
Over the past few years, I have researched the history of vacation and retirement building in South Florida, particularly in the quarter century following World War II. My focus originally centered on the Mackle Company of Miami, which grew from a locally successful building firm known for erecting small houses for veterans in the late 1940s to become the largest homebuilder in the country in 1959. Like other Florida builders, before and since, the Mackle brothers advertised their modest and inexpensive concrete-block vacation and retirement houses in newspapers and magazines across the country while also peddling residential lots through sales agents working in select cities such as Chicago, New York, and Detroit. Mackle’s campaign to “sell sunshine” was but one manifestation of a broader trend, as builders in postwar Florida sought to capture the disposable income of middle-class vacationers and older adults flush with retirement pensions.
The Mackles conflated the vacation and retirement market, as seen in advertisements that sought to lure quite different demographics (see Figure 2). Their national advertising campaign targeted middle-class households in the urban northeast and Midwest, enticing them with the opportunity to escape to South Florida either seasonally or permanently. As a builder of suburban tracts, the firm marketed what it knew best: the detached, single-family house. Yet like savvy developers everywhere by the 1950s, the Mackle brothers also recognized the value of “amenities” in their subdivisions. While the Mackles included shopping malls (a staple of many postwar housing developments), they also incorporated features suited to the Florida leisure lifestyle, namely recreation centers (with pools and shuffleboard courts), boating docks and fishing piers, and public parks and manicured beaches for residents to soak up Florida sunshine. The firm repeated this formula in numerous developments along both coasts of South Florida during the 1950s and 1960s.
“Whatever combination of factors led to the catastrophic structural failure at Champlain Towers South, it prompts consideration of
vulnerabilities and hazards in this landscape of leisure. ”
If the Mackle Company appears to have been the most prolific builder, there were numerous others—some from Florida and others from elsewhere in the United States and Canada (such as the Champlain Towers South partnership)—catering to leisure seekers in the twenty-five years after the war.
In St. Petersburg, James Rosati, Sr., shifted to the retirement market with the waning of the veterans market in the mid-1950s. In Rosati & Sons’ retirement villages, Rosati looked to an unlikely source of inspiration: the postwar trailer park. Rosati modeled Orange Lake Village directly on examples in St. Petersburg patronized by snowbirds, selling small, one-bedroom houses (no larger than a trailer) on small lots surrounding ample facilities for recreation (Figure 3). The legacy of this is, of course, the now ubiquitous “active living” community. Del Webb’s representatives traveled to Florida to view communities like those of Rosati and the Mackles, which Webb ultimately incorporated into the first Sun City (Arizona), as Judith Trolander, John Findlay and others have discussed.
Figure 3. Undated postcard of pool flanked by houses in Rosati & Sons’ Orange Lake Village, Largo, Florida. Courtesy collection of Anna Andrzejewski.
These new leisure-oriented communities demanded a great deal beyond the obvious land and resources that make up any development. To build along South Florida’s coastlines required tremendous preparatory work, given the mangrove forests and swamps. Miami Beach is largely artificial. Dubbed a “billion dollar sandbar” by Polly Redford in a 1970 history, the barrier island was largely developed from fill recovered from Biscayne Bay, a process dating back to its development by business magnate and highway builder Carl Fisher in the 1910s. On the Gulf Coast, St. Petersburg was the site of extensive dredging and filling in the 1940s and 1950s, largely for resort development. The dredging of the intracoastal waterway on the gulf side after World War II prompted further development of recreation-oriented resort communities near St. Petersburg and Fort Myers. On top of reshaping the landscape, these projects required extensive management of water, involving pumping of fresh water in and waste water out, often over long distances. Additionally, to support leisure amenities, developers had to bulkhead canals for boat access and direct water to maintain sandy beaches.
Such feats of engineering prompted battles from the moment they commenced, particularly around “water views.” Developers courted clients in the 1950s with promises of scenic vistas, taking advantage of opportunities to buy “submerged land” in places such as Boca Ciega Bay near St. Petersburg to build artificial peninsulas. Residents loudly protested when new construction at such sites blocked their views, and by the 1960s environmentalists chimed in on the ecological effects of dredge-and-fill. By the early 1970s building on submerged land and creating finger fills—long, artificial peninsulas jutting into open water for residential development—was largely prohibited. But the legacy is seen today along St. Petersburg beach, Marco Island, and parts of Pompano Beach, just to name a few examples, where finger canals provide private boat access via an extensive canal system and bulkheaded docks (Figure 4).
Figure 4. Finger canals built at Marco Island, looking west from the eastern shore of the island, March 15, 1968. Courtesy of the Marco Island Historical Society.
Tensions about large-scale development accelerated alongside a rapidly growing environmental movement. Things came to a head at Marco Island, which the Mackle Brothers—operating as the Deltona Corporation—sought to transform from a swampy barrier island into a premier resort destination. Nearly two decades of legal battles resulted, largely over environmental concerns regarding the massive scale of dredge-and-fill. The Mackles built at Marco, but not on the scale originally planned. Instead of single-family houses along an extensive system of finger canals, the strip abutting the coast became home to ten-story condominiums and hotels, much like those in Surfside and Miami Beach (Figure 5)
Figure 5. Marco Island beach, looking south from Tigertail Beach toward high-rises on Collier Boulevard. Photograph by Anna Andrzejewski, June 2021.
Environmental concerns may have stalled development along South Florida’s coastlines, but ultimately they only redirected it as developers found creative ways to work with, rather than against, regulations. As their permits stalled at Marco, for example, the Mackles established an environmental research station there. Their first project sought to promote fish habitat through the installation of an artificial reef, built of tires, several miles offshore, as I’ve written about elsewhere. Frank Mackle, Sr., did this out of his professed commitment to the environment, stating that the Deltona Corporation’s work at Marco Island was about enhancing, not harming, the site. Such an ethos also drove the master-planned community of Bonita Bay, south of Fort Myers, beginning in the 1980s. The 2,400-acre project was designed deliberately in concert with its landscape, with a bird sanctuary, shell mounds of the Calusa peoples, and wetlands incorporated into what the firm touted as “natural” (Figure 6).
Figure 6. Advertisement for Bonita Bay, Fort Myers News-Press, August 21, 1988, 18A.
However well intentioned, leisure development along South Florida’s coasts has had harmful impacts. In hindsight, we know the environmental costs of resort development on this scale are profound. Dredge-and-fill operations and the present practices of “beach nourishment” (including projects in Miami-Dade) have irrevocably changed the coastlines. As our planet warms, rising seas and increasingly fierce storms are already wreaking havoc. Whereas mangroves and marshes once protected inland development, the removal of the swampy buffer means even more risk to human life and wellbeing (a 2017 study showed wetlands provided tremendous buffering effects that translated into economic savings when Hurricane Sandy struck several northeastern states in 2012).
There are other costs to leisure development as well. Some of these are racial, as Andrew Kahrl has written about. Some are economic; as we saw with the recent winter weather event in Texas, catastrophic, extreme weather breeds expenses that fall on all of us, if unequally. There are also costs associated with the broader demographic shift to the sunbelt including increased energy consumption and, in turn, greater carbon emissions. As the COVID-19 pandemic eases, South Florida’s tourist industry is once again ramping up, bringing throngs of tourists and seasonal visitors to coastal locations, encouraging continued development and redevelopment of this highly vulnerable landscape.
Figure 7. Tricolored heron in mangrove swamp in Estero Bay Park, Bonita Bay, Bonita Springs, Florida. Photograph by Anna Andrzejewski, June 2021.
I came to study this region as a transplant myself. Captivated by aspects of the natural beauty of the mangrove swamps and its fauna, I have grown attached to South Florida (Figure 7). A few days before Champlain Towers South collapsed, I visited the beach at Marco Island. I went to roughly the place where Frank Mackle stood when he promoted Marco in a 1984 video in which he lauded the project for not hurting nature but preserving it. Gazing at the 1980s high-rises and thinking of his words, I found myself implicated in the transformation of South Florida. That day alone, I had kayaked human made water trails, walked the manicured white sand beach, and stayed in a resort development created out of former swampland. Yet, like millions of others, from all across the globe, I continue to participate in this leisure landscape.
Figure 8. Recently constructed house in Everglades City, Florida. Photograph by Anna Andrzejewski, December 2020.
And yet in the wake of the Champlain Towers South tragedy, I also find myself critically evaluating the scale of the last seven decades of development in South Florida. New construction continues unabated amidst sea rise and a warming climate. We have watched the devastating impacts of hurricanes in the last decade in Tampa/St. Petersburg, the Keys, Marco Island/Naples, Everglades City, Miami, and elsewhere. Still, we continue to build in the name of leisure (Figure 8). But at what price?
Notes
[1] “New Condominium Projects in Dade,” Miami Herald (October 5, 1980), 12H.
