When Randy and I moved to Southwest Florida in July 2021 we didn’t know a lot about the area. Today, in fact, I found out for the first time that the closest city, Englewood, is unincorporated. This means there’s no local government or police force. All governmental services are provided by the county we live in, Charlotte. Our address is Rotonda West, which is the name of our development, not an actual town. We share our zip code with another area on the Cape Haze Peninsula called Placida. I don’t understand any of it, but I guess I don’t need to.
We moved here at the height of the crazy Florida real estate market. We bought our house from the MLS listing on the internet, having never been here in person. We considered ourselves lucky to have scored a house at all as there was little for sale and the bidding wars were intense. There’s a story about buying our house you might find fun and interesting, but I’ll tell it another time. We didn’t know the area at all and the whole thing could have gone very wrong. Thankfully, it didn’t.
Unbeknownst to us when we were buying a home, Rotonda West is a unique, circular shaped development. I don’t know of, nor could I find through a Google search, any other perfectly round, designed that way, residential development in the world. Absolutely nothing came up, not even Rotonda West. That may say something about my research abilities, but for now, let’s just say we’re the only wagon wheel shaped planned community on earth. Originally, there were supposed to be 8 pie-shaped neighborhoods in the wheel, but one of them was nixed by the feds because of wetland regulations that came into effect after the development was designed and had started selling.
Rotonda West’s roundness was a grand vision embraced by Joe Klein who filched the original idea from a fellow named Charles Prynne Martin, who allegedly lacked formal architectural or land planning credentials. Selling land was Klein’s niche and, according to a history of Rotonda West by Jack Alexander, Klein “took to land selling like a duck to a swamp”. The original sales material for Rotonda West envisioned a self-contained circular community of 50,000. A few years earlier, Klein tried to do the same thing (Rotonda East) in the Palm Beach, FL area on the east coast of Florida. That development fell victim to skeptical Palm Beach and Martin County authorities and was never built.
The land for Rotonda West was purchased after a weeklong bidding war by the Cavanagh Leasing Corporation in 1967 for $19.5 million from Alfred and William Vanderbilt (yes, descendants of Cornelius Vanderbilt). The Vanderbilts bought it, a virtual wasteland of scrub, pine, palmetto and marsh (perfect for ranching!), for $700,000 in 1951.
The failure of Rotonda East should have been a warning, but new residents in Rotonda West were excited by their splendid new isolation in sunny southwest Florida. Those first years of the development of the circle were rocky, to say the least. The developer was challenged by mismanagement, construction problems, shady sales techniques, and the onset of government environmentalism. All of these things were perfect recipes for trouble in paradise.
Still, more than 50 years after the development company was formed (1969), the first house was occupied (1971), and Ed McMahon and O.J. Simpson (1970s) played key roles in selling Rotonda West as the wonderful paradise we live in today, people from all over the world flock to our wagon wheel shaped community to find their little slice of heaven.
Many of the early residents of Rotonda heard about the development at their state fairs up north where they lived. Back then, there were contests couples could sign up for to win free trips to Palm Beach. Once there, they were pitched to buy lots in Rotonda. Ed McMahon, Johnny Carson’s sidekick, was the national pitchman for Rotonda and he often plugged contests to win a free house and pool. Nationwide interest was built quickly and lots and lots of lots were sold in Rotonda. There was nothing to see when most of them came down in the early 1970s, until the developer flew them over it. Only then could prospects see the circle all laid out for roads and canals.
Lots sold like hot cakes with the understanding that owners could later get a refund or swap for a different lot. News media at the time quoted, in September 1969, that Charlotte County officials were euphoric about Rotonda’s arrival and loudly projected that the county’s 34,000 population would swell, in short order, to 95,000. That actually happened in about 1988.
The original sales materials for Rotonda promised Gulf of Mexico water access from homes in the circle. That never happened, as I mentioned earlier, due to the formation, in 1975, of the federal Department of Environmental Regulation. Original sales materials also touted Don Pedro Island, an ecologically sensitive barrier island just southwest of the Rotonda circle, as a private island “for the residents of Rotonda” to which they’d have legal access In perpetuity. The developer operated a ferry from the mainland to the island from 1972 to 1980. In 1980 the developer severed his relationship with the Rotonda West community but kept ownership of Don Pedro Island. A legal battle ensued, and today Rotonda West residents supposedly still have access rights to Don Pedro, but there’s no way to get there unless you own a boat. And no way to get a boat from a home in Rotonda West to the Gulf of Mexico.
You might remember a TV program called The Superstars from the early 1970s. If not, check YouTube for some clips. Olympic Skater Dick Button had dreamed of a program where international sports stars would compete in 5 out of 10 sports other than their own, collect points, and someone each season would be declared The Superstar. Just as the show and Rotonda West were getting started, Rotonda West was chosen as the location for the sports competition. A lot of infrastructure for the show was built in Rotonda in 1973, with residents complaining that the developer never worked that hard to build their homes. Superstars put Rotonda West on national television and exposed a number of famous people to the community. O.J. Simpson won Superstars in 1975, long before he got in all that trouble when his wife, Nicole, was murdered.
Today, Rotonda West is a thriving, peaceful community where homes are mostly owned by retired folks like us who love living in paradise. Early on, naysayers predicted that a direct hit by a hurricane would flood and destroy Rotonda West. That happened in 2022, about a year after we moved here. We Rotondians were knocked down, but not out. A year and a half after the storm, most of the damage is repaired and it’s hard to tell there was a horrific hurricane here. Except for the number of homes now for sale.
They say that if Rotonda had been square, perhaps fewer would have come. A round community is romantic, they say. I don’t know about that, but as I’ve said many times before in this blog, I love living here. It’s paradise on earth as far as I’m concerned. Eagles live in the tree in our back yard! The rich, interesting history adds to its appeal.
P.S. If, 20 years ago, you’d have asked me what I’d be doing on my 70th birthday (this week!), I would never have imagined how content and happy I’d be as I am today. I thank God for all the blessings and love that envelop me, and for each one of you, who mean so much to me.
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