Continuing the recently inaugurated theme of Anywhere-but-Key-West Diary, I went to the mainland this past weekend to visit a friend. Denise, a Florida native, lives in a small beach house across the street from one of the less normal communities in the southern portion of the Sunshine State, the City of Briny Breezes.
Her place, actually located on a strip of unincorporated Palm Beach County is cute enough, it's construction dating back a few decades to a happier time when this part of Florida lived in the collective memories as a winter playground only and practically vanished in summer. That was a time when the Internet didn't exist (imagine!) and people felt lucky enough to see an orange in December that they were moved to ship the fruit home to unhappy relatives shoveling snow and living on apples. Denise's little "beach house" is around a thousand square feet, 200 feet bigger than my mansion in the Keys, and it also features this thing. whatever it is:
Apparently one has the capacity to burn wood inside the house for whatever reason. Denise, a teacher who grew up on this coast and has lived all her adult life in this area, has always wanted to live by the beach.A few years ago she found a deal on this house:
Open and airy, yet filled with knick knacks all reeking of the past which is the only era Denise relates to, her home is a shrine to the way Florida used to be, and perhaps should become again. She was born up the coast and has a passionate attachment to old Florida, a place of quiet and modest respectability, not the loud and brash and sprawling Florida as represented by the modern mauls and multi-lane highways we call streets. Tongue and groove ceilings and terrazzo floors inside, palms and lignumvitae trees outside, with the ocean nearby. Denise could be a counter culture figure from a Carl Hiassen novel:
Across the street from her long sought after beach house, is another remnant of a bygone era, a remnant that Denise, an inveterate flea market browser, could not actually buy, though someone else did put a bid in recently:
As seen from Denise's porch, behind my wife's convertible, are the neat rows of white boxes that make up the city of Briny Breezes. A developer put a $510 million offer on the entire 43-acre community. The idea was to pay all the occupants of the nearly 500 trailers in the city for their shares and then build luxury condos and hotels in their place. Most of the residents went for the deal after a lot of vocal opposition (led by Denise), but the bursting real estate bubble killed the whole project dead. 
Briny Breezes was incorporated in the 1960's , a little past Denise's favorite era, but it has retained a lot of the human warmth from that fictitious time. The almost-millionaires who are still here as the summer heat builds, acknowledge strangers strolling by with cheery smiles and a greeting. They sit on their steps and drink coffee, ride around their city on golf carts and organize barbeques and shuffleboard games. It's the place where everyone knows your name. And it has what every developer wants: a fabulous beach.
The current bust in the real estate market has kept this strip of undeveloped land open and green for the time being:
It's a block of land in the county, across the street from Briny Breezes, that is slated to see a few 35 foot high condos rear up to overlook the ocean which will give Denise some adjustments to get used to, but for now...things stay as they are, a pause for breath in South Florida's eternal need to rebuild itself.
This weekend was a time to sit around and talk, to greet the passing parade of neighbors, to lean back in the Adirondack chairs and pick out the stars not obscured by the street lights, to duck onto the porch in acknowledgement of the passing summer showers. And luckily for us old farts used to our comforts, Denise has fully functional central air in her home and she was happy to crank it. I've known Denise since 1981, she introduced me to the pleasures of South Florida living as I explored the country on my Vespa searching for a place to call home, and what I most associate with her lifestyle is the sound of fans humming in a losing battle to keep at bay the heat and humidity of a South Florida summer. No longer, thanks to her surrender to air conditioning.
On the subject of nostalgia I bought a pair of top-of-the-line leather flip flops in this very store 27 years ago and I wore them all across country as I rode my Vespa the roundabout way to California (motorcycle clothing was an alien concept). Nomad is still here still selling beachwear and swimming paraphernalia. It's not normal for a small local business to survive so long in the same place:
But Briny Breezes isn't normal. It has a Community Center because it is a community: 
And Denise is just tickled pink by the fact that her home town has the BBC. "But," I protested,"every cable company offers the BBC." Not Briny Breezes Cable Channel 8, she chortled.
And they have a convenience store the like of which I haven't seen anyplace else. It sits on A1A, the coastal highway and looks like any dive selling overpriced milk and beer, but inside I found a haven of yuppie foods, a mixture of traditional jazz and show tunes to shop by and locally produced instant meals, hand crafted soups, Swedish meatball lunches and pasta dishes made just up the street and for sale in a store that defied convention. It looked normal enough, but this was a small store that followed it's own path:
It's not Key West, but Briny Breezes sure is a community in the real sense of the word, a small town for ordinary folk wedged between the manicured mansions and condos of the wealthy snowbirds to the north and the south of its own slice of slightly scruffy beachfront. My visit to Denise's corner of Americana made even me nostalgic for something I never knew, beach town Florida, circa 1950. Those trailers peeking out on A1A:
The developer is threatening to return to Briny Breezes to have another go at buying the entire town, but that doesn't seem likely at this point. For me, it was time to convert the convertible ad get back to the Keys before I start pining for my own home alongside the mouse that roared, on Florida's Atlantic shore.
The city of LaBelle lies on the south side of the river and as soon as your Bonneville crests the bridge there is LaBelle's most famous product:
This isn't a heavily populated county town, Hendry County isn't overly residential, and there's lots of room to store stuff. perhaps you have a few hundred bee hives waiting to be placed? Why, just toss 'em out back:
The town is as pretty as the surrounding woods and the buildings are picturesque and dilapidated to some degree, rather similar to Arcadia in that way.
But highways, like time and tide wait for no motorcycle so it was onwards, ever onwards, south on 29, more straight lines carved across the belly of the state:
My target on this leg of the trip was Immokalee, a farming town in the middle, approximately, of nowhere. The funny thing about this part of Florida is that all the glamor and wealth is on the edges, and the hole in the middle of the doughnut is very impoverished. Hilarious isn't it? Palm Beach, home of every winter resident with millions to burn is part of the same county where cane workers burn and cut cane by hand. Immokalee is part of Collier County, that would be the city of Naples, another enclave of wealth nestled on the gulf coast. Immokalee is a very different kettle of fish:
Immokalee is at the center of a dispute these days over tomatoes. pickers get paid a piece rate for their work and they want a raise for the first time in decades. The owners of KFC/Taco bell and MacDonalds have agreed to pay a penny a pound more but Burger King refuses. It seems weird to me, forgetting the Henry Ford principle of paying workers well enough to afford the products. There again its the way the world works these days and we don't seem to be able to escape the Walmartization of wages and benefits. Immokalee could do with a leg up:
But this is a town of immigrants:
And our migrant neighbors aren't that well liked this election year, so I guess our Mexican vegetable pickers have to cheer themselves up any way they can:
I'm not a pinata type of guy, anyway it's time I got my lily white bottom out of town:
Not so lily white in this heat, and that's my face by the way. The camera got away from me while I was concentrating on riding that long straight road and I shot myself. I wanted to photograph this instead:
I have seen converted school buses all over the world giving their all transporting people and their possessions. But this is the first time I saw a school bus in service as a melon carrier. Ride far enough I suppose, and eventually you'll see it all.
When this place was first bruited people took to wondering what the world is coming to (not much I dare say). Ave Maria is as daft a notion as its name, founded in this instance by the orphan boy who made a fortune creating Domino's Pizza. He could think of nothing better to do with his spare cash than to buy up a few hundred acres of nothing much and proposed the creation of a community based on strict Catholic principles. That flew like a lead balloon, as the American Way apparently doesn't allow anyone to ban condoms, porn on television, or binge drinking off campus. It strikes me as funny that this place stirred up so much hot air and manufactured controversy. Who cares who wants to ban condoms? Whose business is it anyway? I grew up in a Catholic school attached to an Abbey and as far as I'm concerned I don't need to repeat the experience as an adult, thanks. For those that missed out on a Catholic English boarding school experience, there's Ave Maria.
That didn't work so well, as this little back road was like Grand Central Station in rush hour with a constant clamoring of passing vehicles. In a grumpy mood I saddled up and moved on. And came to the big slash in the earth that just a few shorty weeks ago i had been traveling with the wife's Vespa:
Alligator Alley in all it's glory, as seen from the Highway 29 overpass. 
I rode down to the strand where I found the alligators whose portraits I posted a few days ago and bugged back out. I got some pretty impressive white dust on my machine, and myself, in those few miles. From there it was back on the Tamiami blacktop and a quick wave in passing to the Miccosukee villages and their privacy fences:
By the time I was back in the Keys I had been on the road for 12 hours and that was as much as I needed, so the last two hours home were torture in a manner of speaking. Still it was good to see blue water again in this small corner of Florida so unlike anywhere else in the state:
I hope the Florida Keys reputation for tolerance survives the difficult times ahead. I like living in a place where being left alone to get on with it is the countywide credo. Oh, and the swimming is pretty nice too.
The Meadows is a neighborhood outside the confines of Old Town, which means the Historic Architecture Review Commission doesn't nail your ass to the floor, but it's old enough , dating to the 1930's that the houses look cute and conch-like.
The Meadows is the area between White Street and Eisenhower, and Truman and Angela Street. Eisenhower is short street that connects Truman to Palm Avenue and its a bit urban industrial: 
The Meadows is not a neighborhood heavily frequented by tourists, and its far enough from the heavy drinking on Duval to require the use of a cab, or a bicycle or (God forbid) a moped. I suppose that were I planning a night of debauchery I would walk to Duval, a pleasant stroll across town at dusk, and ride home in splendor in a cab. But that's just me and I'm dreaming because there's no way I'm moving voluntarily to town. Or taking up debauchery, as unlikely as that may seem. 
Angela Street, the northern side of the neighborhood, is typical of The Meadows, wooded and lined with a wide architectural variety of houses:
And right across the street, behind the fence is Peary Court, Navy housing. Peary Court used to be open space, littered with large trees and grass and crisscrossed by grassy overgrown streets long since disused. The Navy decided to build on Peary Court and that sent the balloon up, with protesters protesting and people tree sitting and all the panoply of humans acting pissed off. It didn't stop the Navy:
Peary Court was in effect, the first big loss suffered by the anti- development crowd. It just happened to be at the hands of the Navy, who is exempt from city planning and municipal taxes and all. These people aren't and they have got their plans through City Hall. They have the cheek to call these 2000 square foot "residences" The Meadows and they want $1.7 million each.
There are eight single family homes around a pool in this upscale condo and their advertising web site suggests this is the first step to a better sex life. I'm not joking; Google "The Meadows" and see for yourself. (If you need a link you are too lazy by half), and if that doesn't seem so suave there's another one across the street:
No word what this one does to your sex life. How disappointing. Anyway if I were wanting to live in a condo this one below might be more my speed, as long as the neighbors were permanently comatose:
It's on White Street at Olivia, and just across the street is this little gem, the Ben Harrison Gallery.
Harrison is the author of the a superb, gruesomely detailed biography of Karl Tanzler, the man
And if you want to go boating, how convenient, Garrison Bight is right across Eisenhower and there are racks right there:
There are religious centers in The Meadows too, and there used to be a Chabad Jewish outfit until they sold the land that has become the sex obsessed Meadows development. 
I spent a happy half hour on an abbreviated pre-sunset lunch break riding around the neighborhood, checking out this...
...and that... 
...and the other:
The Meadows has homes that look more like they should be in Old town. This is one of a few eyebrow homes left in the city. They were designed to allow upstairs windows to stay open and in the shade to allow airflow. Instead they let hot air in to stagnate.
Pretty enough even if it doesn't work. 
