All those miles of canals

Cape Coral began as a dream.
(Screengrab credit WGCU Public Media)

You have to wonder, what if? What if Cape Coral's developers hadn't done so much dredging almost 70 years ago? Hadn't created so many canals so everyone in the planned community could have a waterfront home? Hadn't inadvertently made conditions perfect for Hurricane Ian.

The 2022 storm's 140 mph winds and surging waters slammed Cape Coral. Canals overflowed, boats and buildings and businesses were destroyed.

The questions popped into mind when I watched a 2006 video about Cape Coral's creation. As with other Florida planned communities, the city in southwest Florida started as a dream. Brothers Jack and Leonard Rosen bought about 115 square miles on a peninsula along the Caloosahatchee River in the 1950s. They formed a development corporation and got busy.

The company clear-cut pine woods, drained swamps, dredged, cut hundreds of miles of canals, destroyed wildlife habitat and harmed the aquifer. 

We cringe, today, to think such actions were allowed there and elsewhere in Florida in the 1950s and 1960s. But during Florida's most recent boom I've seen some new development areas leveled just in my area alone. A popular justification is that clear-cutting is needed because of old, unsafe trees and undesirable vegetation. Right.

Cape Coral was almost an unpopulated wilderness in the 1950s. Families homesteaded there as late as the 1920s. Real homesteading, per rules set out by the national Homestead Act of the 1860s. These families raised cattle and farmed.

That changed when the Cape Coral developers' global sales force fanned across the country and world, selling the Florida dream. The city was promoted as a Waterfront Wonderland. Indeed, it has 400 miles of canals - said to be more than Venice, Italy.

Cape Coral's first four houses were built in 1958. Growth surged in the 1960s. Prospective buyers were flown in. They were wined, dined, treated to vacation-like overnight stays, and subjected to high-pressure sales sessions.

Five families lived in the Cape Coral region in 1950. Mail arrived by boat. The population was 280 by 1960. It had jumped to 11,000 by 1970.

By the time Hurricane Ian landed, the city itself had almost 200,000 residents. The combined population of Cape Coral-Fort Myers metropolitan area was 787,000. That region of southwest Florida had been one of the fastest growing in the state.

In the 2006 video, city leaders talked about their dreams and plans for the future. I can only wonder what they wish for now. I wish them the best.

Learn more about Cape Coral on the Cape Coral Museum of History website.

The 2006 video produced by WGCU Public Media is worth watching. Click here or on the photo below. 

In a familiar 1950s move, Cape Coral's
developers wiped out vegetation and dug canals.
(Screengrab credit WGCU Public Media)