Gordon Drive Intrigue

The panther was just one member of the menagerie owned by Slater, who founded one of the country’s largest food service businesses. There was a miniature horse and a dolphin, rumored to be the sister of Flipper. She operated a sort of mini-ferry in a pond on the front lawn (now filled in), happily pulling a raft that took local children from one side to the other. (Apparently Slater’s dolphin was so well trained that it even shared his memorably twisted sense of humor: Lavern Gaynor remembers Slater encouraging her, at the house with her children, to go for a ride across the pond. She did, whereupon the dolphin got halfway across, dropped the leads to the raft, and swam back to shore without her.)

The 3400 Block and Beyond: Something to Talk About
Forget the tear-down—how about the "move-over?" In the 3400 block of Gordon, the massive home owned by Sandra and Alan Gerry sits on a lot once occupied by a smaller abode. Rather than destroy that one, however, Gerry had it hauled to a nearby address, where it’s now owned by his son. (It’s one of several pieces of property that, although they are interrupted by other residences and lots, make up a sort of loose Gerry "compound." The accumulated value of the property, $58 million plus, also makes the homeowner the city’s largest taxpayer besides Coastland Center.)

While the main Gerry home was under construction in 2001 and 2002, there were so many rubberneckers that the couple had to hire private security to direct traffic. Politely the guard answered questions as the curious parked their cars on or across the street and strolled over to oversee construction. Yes, the home does have a bowling alley, as well as two pools, a spacious hub for monitoring the estate’s mechanical operations, lots of outdoor living space, and plenty of room for friends and family. As befits the man who purchased the rights to the Woodstock festival, the couple is said to entertain frequently.

3630 Gordon Drive
Perhaps the only organization more fearsome than the Mob is the Neighborhood Association. In the late 1990s, Port Royal was abuzz with rumors that Anthony Marchiano, then residing at 3630 Gordon Drive, was, as they say, "connected." That didn’t stop a group of neighbors from banding together to sue the homeowner for his refusal to cut back the sea oats and other vegetation choking a common beach path. Marchiano, who was embroiled in a lengthy custody battle at the time, said he needed the greenery for privacy.

As it turned out, he had a lot to hide. In 1998, federal agents arrested Marchiano at the Fifth Avenue South headquarters of A.S. Goldmen, the boiler room brokerage he owned with his twin brother, Salvatore. In a court room in New York, the two were convicted in 2001 of cheating investors out of an estimated $100 million. The company’s chief financial officer was sentenced to an extra-long prison stint for a bungled murder-for-hire plot targeted at the judge who presided over the case.

As of this writing, the three-story, Bermuda-style home, which has had two owners since Marchiano, is listed for sale at $12.9 million. The path to the beach is clear.

100 Bay Road
Technically, John ("Jack") Donahue, founder of Federated Investors, doesn’t live on Gordon Drive, but his walled estate and a row of picturesque boathouses distinguish the southernmost tip of Gordon, where the street ends in a circular turnaround as the land runs out into Gordon Pass (a favorite spot for frisky dolphins).

Beyond Donahue’s gates lies a compound of structures, including a boathouse and the stately main home, all situated on Bay Road. From there it’s a short boat hop away to Keewaydin, an island with a storied history.

On the maritime maps you’ll find it listed as Key Island, but everyone calls it Keewaydin. Keewaydin was originally a chain of boys’ camps, but the Southwest Florida location was floundering when Chicagoan Lester Norris visited Naples and the Everglades during World War II. Norris fell in love with the island and purchased it as a retreat for family and friends. He let the native key deer roam free around the 1930s lodge while his wife amassed one of Southwest Florida’s most impressive seashell collections. (The late Dellora Norris is the "Delnor" in Delnor-Wiggins Pass State Park—another favored shelling spot.)

Off-island errands required sailing into Naples, and a family member remembers that once during one of their day trips into town, a chimpanzee that Lester Norris had been given locked the island’s groundskeeper in his cage and turned a garden hose on him. Upon the Norris’ return, they rescued the man, damp but none the worse for wear.

The Norrises and their guests traveled back and forth to Keewaydin, using a private marina at the south end of the street. But after part of the property passed into other private hands, use of the lodge "intensified," to quote from a 1994 meeting of the city’s planning advisory council. When the owner asked for additional parking, dozens of Port Royal residents, representing as many as 150 other petitioners, turned out to spin a dark vision of the fume-spewing tour buses, loud out-of-towners, and careless flower-bed trampers they would be held captive to if the use was granted.
It wasn’t. Parts of Key Island deemed "environmentally sensitive" were put into public hands, and a large portion of the private parcel is owned by a company affiliated with Donahue and his family. Rumors of pending high-end development on the island are always rampant.

A generous donor to the Catholic Church, Donahue was also one of President Bush’s super-fundraisers during the 2004 campaign. The New York Times’ Elisabeth Bumiller (once the Naples’ correspondent for the Miami Herald) covered a lunch Donahue threw for Bush that year, during which journalists reporting on the lunch were kept in the guesthouse, away from the action, and protesters were carefully kept several hundred yards north of the Donahue home.

Truthfully, the area around Gordon Pass has always been a magnet for the hoi polloi. It was once the site of Gordon Fish Camp, where transients used tents and trailers as the home base for some prime fishing. The late Larry Brown, an otherwise distinguished resident of Palm Cottage during the 1950s, organized cock fights at the pass, at which the high and mighty and the rough and rowdy bet with and against one another. (Brown also began the Old Naples’ tradition of running up a flag to signal happy hour to the neighbors, so perhaps he wasn’t that dignified.)

Then there are the bicyclists. To hear some residents tell it, the only thing worse than hobos gathering to watch roosters battle to the death are these suited and helmeted health nuts on their two-wheeled terror-mobiles. Greeting each other at the Port Royal Club or the Phil, the cyclists nod to the non-cyclists like the friendly neighbors they are. But riding to the southern end of Gordon each morning, they might as well be Hell’s Angels.

The bikers won a victory in late 2007, when the city repainted the eight-foot-wide bike lane, a safety boon for them, a garish desecration to others. Public opinion split roughly 50-50 on the need for the markings, but all are in agreement that traffic on Gordon is too heavy.

"It’s like walking down I-75 in the morning," says one longtime resident. She’s not entirely wrong: City statistics show that traffic on Gordon is extraordinarily heavy for a dead-end street with a relatively sparse population.

Service vehicles (caterers, construction crews, landscapers, yoga instructors) make up much of that traffic, but many of these are drivers cruising to see what’s new. What’s going up? What’s coming down? Which house just sold? Who bought it? Will the pink house ever sell so long as it’s pink? (Maybe not at $23.9 million.)

The question that most propels these drive-bys: How is the other half living today? Those who ask it feel an absolute freedom to traverse Gordon in search of the answer. Within certain limits, and with a token amount of grumbling, residents don’t begrudge them their curiosity. They understand that although it’s the city’s most exclusive address, in many ways Gordon Drive is Everyman’s Street.