BY ALEX MARSHALL
METROPOLIS MAGAZINE, May 2001
The tip of Florida’s panhandle hangs out over the waters of the Gulf of Mexico like ripe fruit on a low-hanging branch, easy pickings. This skinny, 100-mile strip sits directly below Alabama, almost walling it off from the sea. Located in a different time zone, an hour behind the rest of the state, the panhandle has long been popular with vacationers. Nestled in the bosom of the old Confederacy, families from Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana have flocked to the small beach towns here, giving the coast the moniker of “The Redneck Riviera.” With its aqua-green waters and pure white sand, it probably rivals the real Riviera in natural beauty, if not in movie stars.
In 1981, a developer began a new resort community called Seaside. Located about midway between Panama City Beach and Destin, it was part of a new wave of growth that would hit these sandy shores in the next two decades, turning the coast into a long highway of resort sprawl. The Seaside developer was Robert Davis, who had inherited the 80 acres from his grandfather. Designed by Davis and architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, the resort was a modified version of a small town. So startling was its image that it sparked a national movement called New Urbanism.
As Seaside prepared to celebrate its 20th anniversary, I traveled to this celebrated beach community to see what to make of it. I had written, often critically, about its progeny – the scores of “neo-traditional” subdivisions that now clustered around exit ramps on the outskirts of so many cities – but I’d never seen the mother seed. What was I to make of this very small, but very influential place?
I WAS HALFWAY through Seaside before I realized I was in it. The main state road coming from Panama City, 31A, is lined with condominium towers, resort subdivisions, roadside shops and other detritus. Seaside at first appeared to be just one more cluster of development, done in some vaguely historical style. “Damn, they really got their money out of Steven Brooke,” I thought, gazing out from my rental car. Brooke, a photographer, had taken many of the archetypal images of Seaside that had flashed all over the world, via books and magazines. Often set against a skyline at twilight, his photos had turned Seaside into a latter day Acropolis, a remote outpost of civilization on the Florida coast.
The more humdrum reality of the place was disorienting. I would see a beachfront home, and then on my brain plate would flash the archetypal photo I had seen of the same structure. In his book Seaside (Pelican Publishing 1998), Brooke said his early photographs “intentionally idealized and ennobled Seaside’s simple structures.” He succeeded: the photos were theatrical, not journalistic. Far from a major airport or interstate, located in the deep South away from press and academic centers, Seaside had benefited from its isolation. Most people saw only the photographs.
To see Seaside through a more ordinary lens, it helps to visualize 31A, the coastal highway that runs through it. It’s the spine of Seaside, the central artery, a commercial strip. But it’s clear that Seaside is an appendage to 31A, not the other way around. It’s one more resort development on a highway stuffed with them. Seaside was wealthier than I expected. Homes sell for an average of $700,000 to $800,000, I was told. The company produced newspaper, Seaside Times, recently listed a 2,420 square foot house for $2.25 million. I was also surprised by how few people lived in it. On a winter’s day, I walked the streets for hours, knocking on doors, looking for people. No luck. Management estimated that 90 percent of Seaside’s homeowners live elsewhere. And in winter, even the renters were gone.
The continual question that arises with Seaside, as with so many neo-traditional communities, is what exactly is it? It advertises itself as a small town, yet it’s legally a subdivision, with privately owned streets. Still, outsiders do attend community events and shop at its stores.
Davis, Duany and Plater-Zyberk did something different. Instead of high-rise condos on the beach, which wall off the views like oversized linebackers at buffet-table, they built homes and streets that were a short walk away. Surprisingly, rather than paying for the best view of the beach, people purchased the chance to be part of a self-constructed community. Davis and Duany commodified community. In the past, rich people bought isolation; at Seaside, they bought togetherness.
And it sold. Investing in a lot in Seaside in 1990 was the real estate equivalent of buying Yahoo stock before last year’s bust. But less mentioned by Seaside enthusiasts is that property and land values have doubled, tripled and even quadrupled all along this part of the coast, from Panama City to ritzier Destin. Bill Clinton, the Internet and Alan Greenspan had as much to do with Seaside’s financial success as its design. The wealth of the 1990s, and its lopsided distribution, has created a new class of wealthy families who suddenly could afford a second home on the beach.
Seaside and the neo-traditional movement it has spawned becomes a lot less confusing if they are understood as real-estate ventures, rather than acts of urban design. A developer and two architects created a successful product. They then went around the country, accompanied by professional marketers, selling this product to other landowners and developers.
It certainly worked in Florida. Neo-Seasides are popping up all over, including right next door to Seaside. The big development company Arvida, which owns huge swaths of land around here, is building a neo-traditional community called “Water Color” next door. To the East, Duany and Plater-Zyberk have designed Rosemary Beach, now under construction. These developments lack many of the attributes that make Seaside special: the narrow streets, the formal Beaux-arts street pattern, the walking paths behind the homes. They resemble more conventional subdivisions. Some, like Carillon By The Sea near Panama City Beach, have manned guardhouses at their single entrances. But all these developments have the tall homes with front porches that has become the Seaside style.
But Seaside is difficult to use as a model for conventional subdivisions, where people live year-round. While on vacation, people don’t need dry cleaners, large supermarkets, electronic stores, dentists, CompUSA’s, or any of the other 101 needs of daily life. They don’t drive as many cars. A resort community is akin to a college campus, with specialized requirements. Seaside, despite is prominence, is not really portable.
Seaside might have been something more if it had been part of a larger growth plan. If a state commissioner rather than a private developer had been in charge, you could have laid out “Seasides” every five miles or so, connected by mass transit, and built at the greater density that transit allows. Public authorities could have laid out efficient street systems. In between, a growth management plan could have prohibited development. The developer of Seaside, Robert Davis, immediately embraced this alternate history when we talked one night over dinner at a deserted Italian restaurant down the road. “I can see a point not far from now,” Davis said, “where it would seem completely natural that this entire area would be laid out by the municipal authorities, with minor adjustments as it went along.”
Seaside was clearly an exquisite place in some respects. The streets and tiny walking paths, the requirement that indigenous Florida trees and beach growth be used instead of grass, the care and variety of the wooden houses, made the place something to be admired or respected. It will age well. In addition to the homes, there are non-residential parts of Seaside: an outdoor amphitheater; the Seaside Institute, a non-profit New Urbanist think tank; and a tiny charter school. Most of these were grouped around the pretentiously named “Lyceum,” a grassy commons area. A community chapel is being built here, and Davis said some residents are raising money to build a tiny concert hall.
Still I couldn’t embrace the place emotionally. It was too cute, too controlled, too controlling. In truth, I preferred the beach communities with their simpler houses on unpaved, sandy streets that surrounded Seaside and predated it, like Grayton Beach, just a mile down the road. For all its charm, Seaside was too much about spinning illusions. The postal address was telling. The little business cards said “Seaside, Fl.” But legally Seaside is not a town at all, but part of the town of Santa Rosa Beach, which in turn is part of Walton County. When its few permanent residents participate in public life, they do so as citizens of Santa Rosa Beach.
Perhaps that’s the struggle Seaside best illuminates. Seaside celebrates both public life and a paradoxical escape from it into an exclusive, private realm. At some point, Seaside and the continued debates about its brethren may help us figure out which we value more.
–Alex Marshall is the author of How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl and The Roads Not Taken (University of Texas Press 2000).