Gulfshore Neighborhoods

Residents love Everglades City for what it doesn’t have—a shopping mall, a traffic light, high-rise condos, golf courses or any of the amenities of its more suburban Collier County siblings. The original county seat and the staging area for Barron Collier’s ambitious road-building undertaking (the Tamiami Trail), Everglades City is rich in history and prized for its natural setting, brushing up to the Everglades and Big Cypress National Preserve and set along the banks of Lake Placid and Chokoloskee Bay.
Yet with all this water, E.C. has no beaches. Inevitably, residents are lured by the rural, small-town Americana delivered by E.C., all two miles by four blocks of it, and its ample opportunities for outdoor recreation—fishing, boating or kayaking around the Ten Thousand Islands or hiking and nature photography for landlubbers. In fact, Jan Brock, the sole real estate agent in Everglades City until a recent land rush a few years ago, sees a residency pattern. Southeast Floridians, she says, will buy a weekend escape, gradually lengthening their visits until it’s finally time to make the move permanent. “Everglades City is laid back. You know you can’t be at the mall in five minutes, and you really don’t care,” she says.
Everglades City becomes the center of the seafood universe each February with the annual Everglades Seafood Festival, featuring live music, rides, attractions and, you guessed it, seafood. Other nearby attractions include the Gulf Coast welcome center to Everglades National Park, the 11-mile Jane’s Memorial Scenic Drive in the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve (home of the elusive ghost orchid) and Ochopee, where Everglades photographer Clyde Butcher hangs his shingle and displays his famous black-and-whites.
Everglades City and its surrounding environs—Pleasure Island, Plantation Island, Copeland and Chokoloskee Island (a pioneer trading post and home to the historic Ted Smallwood’s Store) feature a variety of residential offerings—sportsmen’s cabins and condos right on the water, million-dollar estates, Barron Collier-era cottages, mobile homes—and vacant lots. Prices range from nearly $200,000 to more than $1 million.

GOLDEN GATE CITY

Swing sets in the back yard, basketball hoops in the driveway and public facilities that offer an auditorium, gymnasium, aquatics center and fitness center are testament to this unofficial city’s appeal to families. Homes, even those on one of the area’s many canals, are still considered affordable here. As a result, Golden Gate City is becoming a great melting pot, attracting newcomers from Miami and other Southeast Florida venues, as well as first-time Collier County residents.
The conveniences of a full-fledged city are also offered here—mom-and-pop businesses, national chain supermarkets and restaurants, a public library and the tax collector. The Golden Gate Community Center has an auditorium, game and meeting rooms, a woodshop, kitchen and gymnasium. The county-run Golden Gate Community Park hosts children’s sports teams and pick-up games and offers several lighted softball, baseball and Little League fields, a lighted soccer/football field and lighted tennis and racquetball courts. It is home to the Golden Gate Aquatic Complex, featuring several heated pools, a 110-foot water slide and a fully equipped fitness center. Small condos, nestled along the fairways of the public golf course, start in the mid-$100,000s; single-family homes range from around $200,000 to about $500,000.

GOLDEN GATE ESTATES

A rambling address of roughly 43,000 acres, Golden Gate Estates is Collier County’s largest neighborhood, sweeping south from Immokalee Road to Alligator Alley and east-to-west from DeSoto Boulevard to I-75. Its immense size makes owning a large tract of land possible, which appeals to former suburbanites and young families looking for room to spread out.
Early Estates residents tamed swampland into canal-front lots and carved out the Estates’ original five-acre wooded tracts, many of which have now been subdivided to 1.25-acre lots. Still, buyers find enough property to own horses and build sprawling homesteads. The absence of homeowner associations means no annual fees and no one dictating architectural requirements, says Bruce Farrell, a real estate agent with Century 21 and the self-proclaimed Estates King. “People who move to the Estates want to get away from having a neighbor right in their back yard,” he says. The price spread of homes here is across the board—anywhere from $300,000 for older homes with a more eastern address to more than $2 million.

IMMOKALEE

Census statistics cast a revealing picture of Immokalee, a rural farm town where the majority of residents are Hispanic (71 percent), male (56.4 percent) and are of median age of 24.7 years. Settled in 1873 by hunters, trappers, traders and ranchers, Immokalee is the birthplace of Arizona Cardinals running back Edgerrin James. This unincorporated town is facing a renaissance, thanks to the arrival of a university and a new town 10 miles away, and growing attention to the plight and substandard housing faced by migrant field workers.
Much of Immokalee’s retail and commercial base, including restaurants serving authentic Mexican cuisine and groceries, caters to the needs of the migrant workers and local farmers, and is found along Main Street and its side streets. The Seminole Casino is located on First Street, and the 599-acre Immokalee Seminole Reservation, created in the 1980s, is located on the outskirts of town, as is Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary.
Ave Maria University’s permanent campus and the town of Ave Maria, both the brainchild of Domino’s Pizza founder and former Detroit Tigers owner Thomas Monaghan, are set to debut this year. The 5,000-acre project marks the first new major Catholic university in the country in the past 40 years, and the town is the first-ever modern municipality developed in conjunction with a university. It will offer 11,000 homes in a variety of styles (including designated affordable-housing units), a European-inspired town center, La Piazza; schools; parks; and other public facilities. The 100-foot tall Oratory will serve as the visual heart of the university, and given Florida’s flat landscape, will likely be seen from miles away.

ISLES OF CAPRI

This chain of islands becomes stone crab central from mid-October to mid-May, Florida’s season for the succulent crustacean. Many Naples-area restaurants and crab connoisseurs buy the claws right off the boat at Capri Fisheries on Kon Tiki Drive. Located two miles north of Marco Island, Isles of Capri was developed by Tennessean Leland L. “Doc” Loach, whose vision of an island hideaway came true when he purchased the 600-acre mangrove islands in 1955. Loach dredged canals, built a water plant, linked each island with land bridges and carved commercial and residential properties into the wilderness. Civilization seems far-flung; other than the Marco skyline seen from the southernmost island, Isles of Capri is surrounded by undeveloped mangrove islands, part of the Ten Thousand Islands chain.
Island homes include new and older condos, Old Florida fishing cottages and newer mansions. Most homes sit on the water, either canals or fingers of Johnson and Tarpon bays and Big Marco Pass. Boating and fishing are popular pastimes, evident by four on-island marinas and several restaurants that offer docks and Tiki huts. The island chain also has two convenience stores, a community center and a fully staffed fire and rescue department.

MARCO ISLAND

Top the Jolly Bridge linking Marco Island to the mainland, and you’re likely to marvel at this 14-plus-square-mile island. From this vantage point homes seem flush with the surrounding water and the view carries west for miles. At street level however, Marco welcomes with all of the tropical magic that attracted the first population explosion in the 1960s—well-manicured landscaping and tropical homes set against canals, the Gulf and the city’s various inland waterways. Water brought the first settlers to the largest of the Ten Thousand Islands in the 1870s and continues to attract today’s new residents—mainly part- and full-time buyers who want a boat in the back yard and a carefree island lifestyle without sacrificing convenience and amenities—top shopping, restaurants and on-island healthcare.
Marco Island’s earliest settlers were the Calusa Indians, whose hand-carved works, including the most famous—the six-inch wooden Key Marco Cat—have been uncovered during archeological digs. The presence of these primitive people is still felt in Marco’s Caxambas section at the south end of the island, where a 50-foot shell mound creates the county’s highest point above sea level. It’s now home to the Estates and Marco’s highest concentration of multimillion-dollar single-family homes. As recently as the late 1800s, Marco was merely a point on the map. The island wasn’t really inhabited until after the Civil War and the arrival in the 1870s of homesteader William Thomas Collier (no relation to county patriarch Barron Gift Collier). Collier is credited with founding Old Marco village, located at the north end. His sprawling home site operates today as the Olde Marco Inn, and several Collier-era structures still stand.
Marco Island has six miles of beaches, six city parks, designated biking trails, upscale shopping and dining at the waterfront Esplanade, and a number of well-regarded spas and restaurants in resorts dotting the Gulf of Mexico, including the four-diamond Marco Beach Ocean Resort. Marco is a city, voter-approved in August 1997, and by best guesses is expected to reach build-out around 2010. About 300 new homes are built each year.
Sixty percent of Marco Island’s homes are on the water—the Marco River, the Gulf, canals and surrounding bays and estuaries. Offerings include multimillion-dollar estate homes, efficiency condos starting in the mid- to high-$100,000s, time-shares and decent single-family homes, priced, on average, at about $600,000. Most are within walking or biking distance of Marco’s beaches. Tigertail Beach, on the island’s north end, offers five boardwalks, a bathhouse, concessions, beach rentals, volleyball and views of Sand Dollar Island, which has the largest concentration of shorebirds in South Florida. Resident’s Beach, at the intersection of Collier Boulevard and San Marco Road, has chickee-hut-shaded picnic tables, restrooms and a children’s play area, and South Marco Beach is found on Collier Boulevard. Other public facilities include the Collier County Racquet Center, Frank E. Mackle Jr. Community Park and Caxambas Park.