Cape Coral: The City That Drained a Swamp and Sold the Pieces
Near Fort Myers, Florida
In November of nineteen fifty-seven, two brothers from Baltimore named Jack and Leonard Rosen paid six hundred seventy-eight thousand dollars for a piece of southwest Florida that was, by most reasonable assessments, a swamp. Redfish Point, as it was known, sat across the Caloosahatchee River from Fort Myers. It had mangrove forest, wet prairie, cypress domes, panthers, alligators, otters, and flocks of spoonbills. What it did not have was roads, or houses, or any infrastructure of any kind.
The Rosens were not developers by training. They had made their early money selling hair care products on the road, and later on television, at a time when television was just beginning to reach American living rooms. They understood selling. And what they now had to sell was a vision: a city of canals and waterfront homes in the Florida sunshine, priced just within reach of the postwar American middle class.
Construction began in January of nineteen fifty-eight. The first four homes were completed in May of that year, on Riverside Drive and Flamingo Drive. Between those first foundations and the city that exists today lay one of the most ambitious dredging operations in the history of the American South. The Rosens' crews dug canals across the peninsula, more than one hundred sixty miles within the first half decade and far more over the years that followed, creating waterfront lots where there had been nothing but swamp. They moved more cubic yards of earth than were moved during the construction of the Panama Canal.
Every day, when the sales campaigns were running at full speed, the Rosens' own airline flew up to five hundred prospective buyers down from the Northeast and Midwest for a weekend look at the development. Salespeople were trained to close on that first visit. The pitch worked. By nineteen sixty-seven, Gulf American Land Corporation, as the Rosens named their company, was the largest land sales company in the United States and Florida's fourth-largest publicly traded corporation.
Cape Coral was incorporated as a city in nineteen seventy. By then the canals were dug, the lots were sold, and more than eleven thousand people lived in a place that had held exactly none, fourteen years before.
