Seaside: From Creek Country to the First New Urbanist Town

The eighty acres beneath Seaside carry centuries of use most visitors never imagine. Muscogee Creek and Euchee people moved into the Florida Panhandle in the seventeen hundreds as Spanish colonial pressure pushed them south. The longleaf pine forests along the Gulf shore fed a turpentine and logging economy through the eighteen hundreds and into the early nineteen hundreds, when workers scarred the trees with deep diagonal cuts to bleed resin.

By the nineteen thirties the timber was exhausted and the industry collapsed. In nineteen forty-six a Birmingham department-store owner named Joseph Smolian bought eighty acres of this spent coastal land as a family retreat. Decades later his grandson Robert Davis inherited the property and hired architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk to design something radical: a walkable town with front porches, narrow streets, and buildings close to the sidewalk.

Construction began in nineteen eighty-one. Seaside became one of the first New Urbanist communities, proving the idea before it had a name, and later became famous as the set for the film The Truman Show.