Imagining Naples

There's no place like Naples.

Aficionados have probably made that claim since Walter Haldeman bought the town in 1890 and started inviting his Kentucky friends here for winter getaways.

Haldeman likely wouldn't recognize the Naples of today. Yet, in many ways, the manner in which the community dev-eloped was guided by his actions-and those of the visionaries who followed him. The first-and most influential-was Glen Sample, a Chicago advertising executive who discovered Naples in 1938, recognized its potential and, between that first visit and 1950, bought two square miles of swampland, hammock and beachfront that he turned into Port Royal. Until his death in 1971, Sample retained the right to approve which architects were allowed to design in his community and what those designs could and couldn't entail.

"He was a sharp character as to what was good-looking and what wasn't," recalls Dick Morris, an architect who arrived in 1954 and subsequently designed a number of homes in Port Royal and Aqualane Shores. "There were people he didn't think would fit into Port Royal, and he would buy their lot back from them. He was the king. But, looking back on it, sometimes you need that kind of enlightened authority to make things work."

Because Sample intended Port Royal as Naples' upscale community from the start, he had immense influence on the development of Naples' style. Most early architects have similar memories of his presence and impact. Bill Tracy arrived in 1952, the first genuine architect in town, according to his family. His widow, Helen, remembers Sample driving by their Port Royal home one day and telling them to clean their roof. "He was a scruffy old guy, but I liked him," she says. "Being in the advertising business in Chicago, he wrote his own copy, and I remember him saying this was not the place for swamp renaissance or mud-hut manors."

The Tracys came to Naples on the advice of their investment counselor. "We were getting ready to build a house in Fort Lauderdale, but he said, 'This is where it's going to happen,'" Helen Tracy recalls. "Sample had just opened Port Royal, and lots there were going for the same price as in Old Naples. Everything was very primitive. There was a movie theater where Marissa's is now. It was a Quonset hut left over from World War II, and when it rained you couldn't hear the dialogue. We had to go to Fort Myers for our mortgage. It was a big adjustment for me."

Tracy, greatly influenced by Ber-muda-style architecture, was a contemporary designer. He went on to design nearly 70 homes in Port Royal, as well as the Conservancy's Naples Nature Center and the school in Everglades City. He enjoyed helping to shape Naples, but was less pleased with some of what he saw later.

Tracy's son and namesake recalls, "He was big into worrying about zoning. He used to raise Cain at the building department. He liked Port Royal and Park Shore, but he certainly wouldn't like what he'd see now."

Morris, who worked for Tracy for a few years before opening his own practice with partner Don Nick, shared his mentor's regard for the simple life and for preserving what was here. His proudest achievement, he says, was designing some 300 condominiums and the clubhouse at Wilderness, and working to preserve the natural surroundings of the site.

"It was quite a challenge," Morris reports. "They had this beautiful, lush vegetation and big trees. They laid out the golf course, and then Wes Downing and Earl Frye asked us to do the architecture. I wanted something to go with the woods, so all the buildings had wood and stone as part of their exterior."

Morris' passion for the woods prompted him to convince engineers to clear only a 30-foot-wide swath for the roads within the development, rather than the traditional 60 feet. "I said, 'Why do we need to cut all those trees down? Why can't the pipes go under the street?'" he recalls. "When you go into Wilderness now, you go through some areas where the trees are arching over the street."

Despite that success, Morris preferred working with individuals on homes, where he could sit and talk with the owners to find what they wanted and needed. He also liked the diversity that comes with a neighborhood rather than a development.

"Port Royal really had a diversity of style," he notes, "and I think it's good to have different architects, so you won't have a cookie-cutter approach. I think Port Royal especially set the style for Naples. If Port Royal had become a trailer park instead of an upscale subdivision, the city of Naples might have been totally different."

A fish camp/trailer park did once exist at the end of Gordon Drive. "It was wiped out in Hurricane Donna," Morris says. "Sample jumped in then and got the zoning changed, so that it was the same as Port Royal."

Now retired, Morris has been asked to serve on the city's design review board. He has already advised the council that, if the right criteria are set, both diversity and aesthetic appeal will be ensured. "When I got here in '54, every piece of land was zoned, and commercial property was all in a separate area," he adds. "I think that helped a lot. The city government really set the stage. Early on, the city chose to spend money on landscaping. That said this was tropical Florida and this was a community that cared about its looks."

Morris also worked in areas where commercial land brushed up against residential. One such project was the old Naples Art Gallery along Broad Avenue, where he placed dormers on the second floor. "I put four residential units on top," he explains. "I felt it was a transitional building, so I thought the right thing to do was to give the building a residential feeling."

Despite working in upscale neighborhoods, Morris concentrated mostly on early homes with modest designs encompassing no more than 3,000 square feet. He is astounded by some of what he terms today's "starter castles" that can embody 10 times that space. "I think the style of Naples [as] an upscale community on the beach is already set," he says. "But I do wonder what's going to happen to some of these massive houses when the people can't or don't want to keep up that much space."

Hurricane donna swept into Naples in 1960 and left a new land of opportunity in its wake. Insurance adjusters came to assess the damage and then pumped money into the town. Some even decided to settle here. Word of the little resort community began to spread, and the phenomenon of Port Royal began to stretch beyond Old Naples.

During the '60s, development focus shifted slightly north, to Park Shore, where Ray Lutgert filled in more marsh and mangroves to create a new beachfront community. While high-rises popped up along the shore, the most architecturally remarkable development appeared on the other side of the road, along the bay. The Villages on Venetian Bay were unlike anything else in Naples at the time. Even today, this eye-catching mini-city seems to float on the water. The Villages are the work of Walter Keller, widely regarded by his peers as one of the most important architects in Naples history. Keller moved here in 1959, ready to grow with the area. Although he died in 2001, his projects cover the county, including the Plaza on Third Street South and the World Tennis Center off Airport-Pulling Road.

"He's all over the place," says his widow, Polly Keller. "He worked so closely with clients to try to create their feel and vision."

Bob Batscher, who worked as Keller's field representative, believes that the architect's success resulted not only from design talent but also from a strong work ethic and attention to detail. "He was in the office no later than 4:15 in the morning," Batscher recalls. "He would order out for lunch and take a half hour at his desk, then work until 4 p.m."

By watching Keller's buildings take shape, Batscher developed a feel for what made a design work, whether it was modern or traditional. "The thing I found was that proportion was the most important thing," he says. "Walter's designs were methodical, almost like they were playing a melody. That makes it more like a picture or a song than a building."

Batscher adds that the specifications and details on Keller's plans were extremely thorough. He insisted on having adequate time to develop his plans and that Batscher be on site to make sure that his plans were followed to the letter. "With his clients, he was the greatest guy in the world," Batscher says. "But with the general contractors, they had to toe the line. He was a very different man with them. A grizzly bear and a rattlesnake rolled into one."

Yet Keller had a heart of gold, providing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of pro-bono work to such organizations as the David Lawrence Center and the Humane Society. And he wasn't without his frivolous side. In his own home, built out over water, Keller designed and included a sliding panel in the floor-so he could fish from his easy chair.