Gordon Drive Intrigue

From the quiet estates at the northern end of the street to the sprawling compound to the south, every address tells a story. Whether it’s the one about the now-vanished menagerie that included a joke-playing dolphin and a temperamental panther, or the one about the annoying neighbor whose fellow Drive residents finally saw him led away in handcuffs (although not, alas, for his code violations), there are innumerable tales to tell. These are a few.

1188 Gordon Drive
Novelist and social observer Tom Wolfe once noted that the real rich live in neighborhoods with hardwood trees. (Poseurs are doomed to brush pine needles off their cars.) What might Wolfe make of the awesome banyan and mahogany canopy that shelters part of Gordon Drive?
This brace of stately trees, nature’s testament to man-made wealth, stretches southward from a modest clapboard home built in 1918 by N.P. Sloan, the town’s first realtor. The 2,300-square-foot landmark is sheltered by an enormous banyan planted around the same time by Sloan’s young son. Although some of Sloan’s descendants reside in the historic cottages ringing the property, this is now the studio of Paul Arsenault, an artist who fell in love with Naples decades ago and made a career of depicting the city’s charms.

2100 Gordon Drive to the Port Royal Club
Except for the Gulf of Mexico in their back yards, the residents who live on this stretch of Gordon might as well be squires in the English countryside, dwelling on three-plus acre parcels with space for guest homes and elaborate landscaping. Seen from the air, the individual addresses in this stretch resemble nothing so much as miniature villages.

Technically, the largest tract of land at 10-plus acres encompasses a couple of addresses. The main estate boasts what is either Gordon’s ugliest duckling or its most beautiful swan, depending on how the observer feels about a Japanese, pagoda-style residence dropped into the middle of the subtropics. A favorite slow-down spot for sightseers, it has two tennis courts, an elaborate koi pond (lake might be a better word), and what city documents call "a non-habitable tea house."
Most homes are set safely back from the road, away from prying eyes, an ideal setting for a street whose residents are described as "mostly private." "Famously private" might be the better term for Miles Collier, descendant of the county’s namesake, and Arthur Allen, global software magnate. Both step out for business deals or good causes, but they resist interest in their private lives with a zeal normally expressed by ants being fried under a magnifying glass.

But high-profile deals reap high profiles, even if only temporary ones, and the bashful businessmen made news together in spring 2007 when Collier sold a four-plus acre estate to Allen for a record-setting $40 million. Allen is said to be "renovating" the home, built in 1994. (If busy construction traffic is any indication, the difference between "renovating" and "gutting" lies in the eye of the beholder.)

Fortunately for Allen, the estate comes with built-in protection from rolling shutterbugs and pedestrian gawkers: a wall fronting Gordon. This edifice is what remains of the estate as it was when it was owned in the 1930s by the Uihlein family, of Schlitz Brewery fame. (What made Milwaukee famous lives discreetly in Naples: Pabst heirs also own property on Gordon Drive.) Call them the pioneers of panache: Port Royal wasn’t even a gleam in developer John Glen Sample’s eye when the Uihleins and their friends the Briggses (of Briggs & Stratton engines) moved to Gordon Drive, rendering the address instantly fashionable.

2900 Gordon Drive: The Port Royal Club
Although it’s now dwarfed by the 45,000-square-foot residence of Sandra and Alan Gerry, farther south on Gordon, for decades the Port Royal Club was the biggest kid on the block. Still the center of a lively social scene, the club, at 33,000-plus-square-feet, opened in 1959. Seated on five acres of land, it was personally financed by developer John Glen Sample, to the tune of $1 million, as part of his vision for Port Royal.

Sample, who had made his fortune in advertising, was president of the club for its first seven years (one- to two-year terms have been the norm since), and some of its bylaws still bear the hallmark of the man who believed no vision was too big to carry out and no detail too small to micromanage.
Naples native Sherrill Dixon remembers riding in Sample’s Jeep as a seven-year-old, down what was then a shell road, while the developer described to her father the dredging that would turn the southern end of Gordon Drive into saleable beach-front parcels. The earth moved—literally—to accommodate Sample’s scheme: Mary Watkins recalls that the developer had Gordon Drive itself shifted slightly east, south of the Port Royal Club, so that the residential lots on the Gulf side would fit his specifications.

Lots of developers before and since have kicked themselves for not having Sample’s drive and vision, but those qualities came at an arguable cost.

It’s true that he saw the potential in a piece of swampland others overlooked, but as the late Marjory Stoneman Douglas so eloquently points out in The Everglades: River of Grass, the best potential use of a piece of swampland is in its natural role as part of Florida’s delicately balanced eco-system. In theory, and some of our region’s recent golf developments to the contrary, Sample’s wholesale remake of the landscape would be federally prohibited today.

Sample left an unintended legacy in environmental circles: Alarmed by the dredging and filling, and the destruction of the mangroves, some leading members of the community were galvanized into action, coming together to buy land for preservation and to found some of the Gulfshore’s most prominent conservation groups.

Sample personally approved the architectural plans for every home, and he insisted that no two homes be alike. But, priding himself on being a great judge of character, Sample also personally approved every buyer. Although he rejected many for quirky and unclear reasons, there is some suggestion that he also turned away "diverse" residents, even those with cash in hand. The result was that his Gordon Drive was populated by men and women who, for the most part, looked and thought and worshiped exactly the way Sample did.

Fortunately, on today’s Gordon Drive, there is a refreshing mix of personalities and demographics. From infants to the elderly, the street’s residents represent a variety of occupations, hometowns and religious faiths. Driving by a modern, minimalist home two houses down from a warm, Cape Cod-inspired one, you could say that Sample realized part of his vision—if not, thank goodness, the rest.

The 3000 Block: Much Buzz
Sample loved media coverage of Port Royal, so long as he could control it, but some stories have a life of their own. In Penny and Lee Anderson’s case, perhaps it’s the property itself, located in the 3000 block of Gordon, that’s the source of the inadvertent buzz. Just as Sedona, Ariz., has its magical vortices, this is an estate where anything can happen—and has.

As early as the 1960s, an editorial in the city’s daily newspaper warned Port Royal residents to lock their doors, as out-of-town prowlers had been attracted to Naples by its reputation "as a playground for millionaires." In late 2002, two of these usual suspects stumbled onto some very unusual items at the Andersons’ 27,000-plus-square-foot villa.

Pulling a quick grab-and-go while no one was home, the thieves removed a couple of paintings they thought they could fence. Unfortunately, their taste in art was a bit too high-brow: They had stolen a Monet and a Renoir, museum-quality pieces that were valued together at around $6 million. International art-crime squads, the feds and the Naples police bore down on the culprits, who couldn’t wait to hand the hot art over during an undercover sting operation in Miami. (At a 300-plus-person charity lunch at the Anderson home in the spring of 2003, the genial host pointed lines of curious guests to the paintings, by then safely rehung.)

There was also a thrilling moment under a previous owner, John Slater, when his panther hurled himself out of the front picture window and tore down the street. (Although perhaps it happened so often the neighbors got used to it.) It wasn’t as though the cat didn’t get enough fresh air—the sight of Slater walking his exotic pet on a leash through Old Naples and into a local bar was a common one.