Ah, Venice… Nope, it’s Fort Lauderdale, but the view’s great from a water taxi

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/01/2011 (5740 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As our Water Taxi pulled away from the dock near our hotel and continued south on the Intracoastal Waterway towards downtown Fort Lauderdale, the tour guide on board pointed to the waterfront home on our starboard side.

“That used to be the home of the actor Nick Nolte,” he said of the sprawling, silver-and-white bungalow. “When Nolte moved to California in 1998 after living for 10 years in Fort Lauderdale,” said the guide, “he just walked away from the house and left it for his sister.”

“She sold it and made $8 million.”

Water Taxi is a great way to see Fort Lauderdale. Despite its name, it is a water-bus service. Formerly part of Broward County’s public-transit service, it broke away in 2006 after a management dispute and operates independently, mainly as a tourist attraction.

For $15 a day, passengers can ride on a Water Taxi boat as much as they want, getting on and off at the 14 stops whenever they want. The stops are situated along the Intracoastal in the Lauderdale area, as well as the New River, which runs inland from Intracoastal and connects the waterway with the downtown core.

For people who do not have access to a boat while visiting Fort Lauderdale, Water Taxi is an inexpensive way to get a glimpse of the famous canal system that has earned the city the nickname Venice of America.

More than 130 kilometres of canals intersect with the Intracoastal and New River in the metropolitan area, a grid that is larger than the more famous one in Italy. Many of America’s rich and famous have waterfront homes here — and the Water Taxi guides have no shortage of entertaining stories about them.

Down from Nolte’s house, we saw the waterfront mansion CNN founder Ted Turner built for his wife (now ex) Jane Fonda. Today, said our guide, it is owned by Leonard Stuart, a Canadian who made a fortune in the bingo industry. We also saw the modest bungalow where Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz lived, as well as the larger estates of the Wells family of Wells Fargo, and the Busch family of Anheuser-Busch.

As we travelled west and up the New River towards downtown, our guide explained how the canal system dates to the Florida land boom (and bust) of the 1920s. Demand for waterfront property exceeded supply, he said. As a result, canal dredging began in the Lauderdale area. At the time, gangsters Al Capone and Bugsy Siegel had fishing cabins on sleepy New River.

Downtown Fort Lauderdale is a work in progress. Just north of the New River, and parallel to it, is Las Olas Boulevard, the city’s main shopping street. Farther west, near Water Taxi’s downtown terminus, commercial and residential highrises dominate the landscape. Here, passengers can disembark and walk along Riverwalk, a new riverfront pedestrian walk that connects popular bars and restaurants. An oddity in the middle of all this new development is Stranahan House, a large two-storey riverfront cottage.

It’s the oldest house in Fort Lauderdale, our guide said. It dates to 1901.

That’s old for Florida. Given how busy Fort Lauderdale is today, it’s hard to imagine there was hardly anything here in the 1890s, when Montreal was already 250 years old.

Stranahan House was a trading post when it opened, our guide said. It was built with wood from Dade County pine, a tree that is now extinct. Dade County pine is as hard as steel.

By the 1930s and 1940s, Fort Lauderdale’s canal system had become home to many well-known public figures in the United States, especially movie stars. Returning downstream along the New River, we passed a downtown landmark, the Riverside Hotel, where actor Ronald Reagan presided at the official ribbon-cutting in 1937, 43 years before he was elected U.S. president.

A KEY figure in Fort Lauderdale’s history was Johnny Weissmuller, the swimmer who won gold medals for the United States in the 1924 and 1928 Olympics and went on to greater fame as an actor in the old Tarzan movies. After his film career was over, Weissmuller went to work as director of public relations for Fort Lauderdale’s International Swimming Hall of Fame.

To help promote the facility, Weissmuller visited university swim clubs across the country to encourage all these fit and energetic young men and women to come down to Fort Lauderdale during their spring break. This was the beginning of Fort Lauderdale’s rise as a spring-break mecca for college kids, a reputation that was cemented with the 1960 movie, Where the Boys Are, starring Connie Francis.

By the 1980s, Fort Lauderdale had got tired of its spring-break association and it set out to reinvent itself as a more family-oriented destination. Along the oceanfront strip, new high-end hotels that take up whole city blocks have contributed to the image transformation.

The change is being mirrored up and down the Intracoastal and New River, and their intersecting residential canals. Demolition and reconstruction have been the name of the real-estate game, even through the economic downturn.

New monster homes replacing the old bungalows are being built right up to property lines. In some cases, garages are being put in the basements and swimming pools on the roofs.

Up and down the Intracoastal, you can see plenty of barges these days, carrying excavators and construction supplies. Outside one home, our guide pointed to palm trees that were being planted at a cost of $10,000 each.

At one corner canal lot on the New River, our guide pointed out the former mansion of entrepreneur Wayne Huizenga (Blockbuster Video, Waste Management, AutoNation). “Even though the home is only one kilometre from the downtown core,” the guide said, “Huizenga used to commute into work in a helicopter. His neighbours didn’t like that. They complained about the noise, and the wind generated by his helicopter. That is, they complained until Huizenga bought them out and got rid of them.”

This got our guide talking about his favourite revenge fantasy. It begins with the banks agreeing to lend him $4 million after endorsing his devious business plan: he buys a waterfront bungalow on a canal for $4 million and paints it an ugly plaid. His rich neighbour doesn’t like it, so the neighbour buys him out, for $6 million. Our guide-turned-property investor trades up to a new house for $6 million, paints it ugly plaid, and gets bought out this time for $8 million.

He trades up and up and up, until finally he buys the oceanfront Trump Tower. Now the owner of a symbolically important piece of Fort Lauderdale real estate, he starts renting out the rooms to college kids for $39 a night, and it is the 1960s all over again.

 

— Postmedia News