Transcription
His father was a home builder, not to the extent of doing large developments, but a home here, a home there, renovations. And his grandfather was also a carpenter before him, so there's a family lineage of building.
But what drew my father specifically was in 1946, after the war. The run-up in housing, the demand for housing was pretty phenomenal, and he saw an opportunity. And he started building, quite literally, one home at a time, uh, for a number of years. And then was able to acquire several lots and started building up the, the, uh, the business of home building from that point.
Really, my father started building in 1946 in St. Petersburg, Florida, one home at a time. Built it up from there and was doing some work around various little developments around Pinellas County, mostly in South St. Petersburg, down by the water. You had a community called Tierra Verde, he acquired some lots in there, did a little building.
So in 1955, he acquired property just outside the city limits in Pinellas County, unincorporated, and he started a project. He conceived of a city called Kenneth City. Interesting point, he named all of his projects after his children. Leslie Heights was for Leslie, my sister. Leslie Myrna Park was for my sister Myrna. Cheryl was for her middle name. And then I only got one subdivision named after me, that's Kenneth City.
But he conceived it as a protest, and as he envisioned it, it would be a city that didn't need taxes, that you could work off of homeowner taxes, you could work off a commercial sector between what they would pay for sales tax. And for many, many years, it remained a tax-free environment. He finished that up, building Kenneth City, finished it up in about 1965, I think. Don't quote me on it, but I believe that was the last home that was built. And it was a, at that point, a fully incorporated city. It had a city council, a mayor, police chief, a volunteer fire department that was actually really pretty good.
So he wanted to say, "Well, can we divide ownership interest?" Of course, you can. It's done all the time. You sell a lot, you build a home, that's a divided ownership interest. But can you build it vertically where you own a condominium? What became known as a condominium. You own an area of space that is attached to other areas of space, but you don't share any liability. It's a corporation, yes, but everybody has their individual ownership rights within that overall scheme. So you own one-sixteenth or one-eighty-second, whatever it is, of that condominium. But the responsibility is on the individual owner. There's no shared liability in that scheme.
So that was pretty innovative at the time. And he went to the bank and convinced the banker to do it. And the banker said, "Sydney, I don't understand a word of what you said, but I know you. I know your record. I trust you. I know you're good for the money." So that's how Dad got off and running building condominiums. And that's a community called Clearview Oaks, which, as it turns out, was the first modern condominium community in the country. You didn't know that.
Two years later, that was a grand experiment, and it worked really well. He sold the community, built it, sold it out in, in just a matter of a few years, from, like I said, from approximately 1959, and was pretty well done with it by 1965 or '66. And he realized that that's, that's a great concept. There's terrific potential here, but it isn't enough. It wasn't enough because what he did was he just built a home. He built the condominium, and he built a small little recreation building where people could get together. They had a pool table, they had cars, there was a social activity center. But he didn't figure that was enough.
So at this point, he was always out looking for land, acquiring more property. And he acquired a series of groves in North Central Pinellas County. And he was able to create an assemblage of a little over 500 acres in that time. And in 1966, he started the On Top of the World community.
Well, why did you call it On Top of the World? Well, interestingly, this property that he acquired was the highest land in Pinellas County. It was four or five miles inland from the bay and four or five miles inland from the gulf, and about three miles inland from the bay. So it was not in any flood zone. And interestingly enough, from Corpus Christi, Texas, all the way around the coast, from Louisiana, all the way around Florida, and up into Virginia, it was the highest land above sea level, mean sea level, approximately 66 or 67 feet above sea level.
Now, interesting story, what was with the name? Okay, you have this high property that's somewhat coastal, overlooking the coast. And the popular song, "On Top of the World." It was a motive of some very positive thinking, some very positive ideas. And, you know, it was a name that really stuck. It caught on with people. "Where do you live?" "On Top of the World." "I live on Top of the World."
But what was unique about On Top of the World was that it was based around recreation as a way of life. That at the time, he built a million-dollar, and I do mean a million-dollar, recreation center. People thought he lost his mind to put that much money into facilities. But he didn't stop there. He built an 18-hole golf course and a nine-hole golf course and made them completely private, not open to the outside, and gave free golf to all the residents. So it was really an off and running community.
And my father had a real sense of drama, you know, that sense of arrival, that whole entry sequence. And there's this iconic arch, um, like the Arc de Triomphe, that sits out in front of the community. And you go through this, under this arch, as you enter the community. And the first thing you see is a very large globe of the world. And the globe of the world was actually to scale. Everything on it was to scale. He had a, just a real artist and a real artist and working for him who could put that together, conceive of it, and put it together. And it was situated in a central garden. And in the garden were fountains, a series of flowing fountains. It was just a wonderful place to walk. And people would come, they'd park outside the gates, they'd walk in just to see the garden and walk in the community, walk in that area. So it was a community that, in its day, was ahead of its time.
He really wanted to buy many thousands of acres. This was his game plan. And it didn't necessarily have to be in the United States. He started looking around the world for the right piece of property to do this master plan concept that he had in mind. And he looked all over Florida. I know he looked in South Africa. He looked in other countries as well. And it's funny how it worked out, but he was able to acquire 13,000 acres of land right here in Marion County from Norris Cattle Company. Norris Cattle Company, or Norin Corp, was the parent company, and they were very big landowners in Florida.
Following the depression, hay was about controlling every aspect of the development, from the landscaping to the construction, to the type of homes that would be built, to the marketing, every aspect of development. He wanted control. He had a vision. And then, and that vision was, was about beauty, was about giving people tremendous value for their homes, for what they lived in, for what they occupied in the space. And strangely enough, On Top of the World had become such a household name at that point, such a brand, in a word, that he couldn't depart from it. So it became known as On Top of the World Central, On Top of the World of Central Florida. And we began that project. He acquired that project in 1975.
He said, "Well, you know, that land we've been looking for?" And I said, "Yeah, yeah, you've been looking for a number of years." And he says, "I think we found it. In fact, we wrote a contract the other day on the back of an envelope." So, "Okay, on the back of an envelope." So that's basically what it was, it was a letter of intent. And he was dealing with Mr. Ferguson, Fergie Ferguson, a blessed memory, of Norin Cattle Company. And Dad said, "Well, if you do this, I'll do that." I wrote it down. And Fergie said, "Well, I can't do this, but I can do that." And so they wrote it down. And before you know it, they had about seven or eight points on the back of an envelope. And they went over to the Norris Cattle offices in downtown Ocala. And they walked the block to the offices, to the law offices of Eris, Cluster, Curry. Presented the envelope to Landis Curry Jr. And they said, "We want a contract." And, "Oh, by the way, did we tell you it's December 12th? We need to close this before December 31st."
So here, consider buying almost 13,000 acres of land with no survey. You got to get title insurance done. You've got all kind of due diligence work. Dad, due diligence? What did he know? He knew it. He saw it. He trusted the people. They trusted him. That was the extent of his due diligence. And by golly, they got it closed on December 30th. And Dad went to work.
So he took what he had and he worked with it. And we went back to the state and we solidified the vested rights and consolidated some of the units. And then he went back to the state and he commenced what's called a Development of Regional Impact study. And he went on with that DRI, that study. And it was completed in 1982, appealed and resolved in 1983. Oh, we had already begun construction in 1982 as soon as we got our first approvals, which was allowed.
And his concept was a townhome. You like townhomes? You could put high style on it, and they're incredibly efficient. And I love building them because, to tell you the truth, the only space within that townhome that was not utilized was that last four feet right under the stairs where you really couldn't jam anything because it was just too tight. But we had storage all over the place in those homes, in those townhomes. So that's where we started in Ocala, in Marion County, with On Top of the World Central, started building townhomes.
My father was always a believer in the future. You know, just because it's tough today doesn't mean it's going to be tough tomorrow. The eternal optimist. And so we started building very, very affordable villas, attached homes that were running anywhere from about 1250 to 1800 square feet. Very energy efficient because, hey, we remembered the oil embargo, they had to be energy efficient. But they had a lot of street appeal because every home had a porch, and on every porch was a porch swing, and was a railing, and some brick back molding on top. So it was very kind of a hometown feel. And people responded beautifully to it. It was really, really well done.
But I knew he had a pricing problem when I was driving with a gentleman. He didn't want to take my truck, we took his car. I was riding in his Lincoln Continental. Remember, never forget the guy, big Texan, big old long Lincoln Continental. And he's looking at the community, and I'm pointing out homes. And he says, "Son, how much is that home right there?" I said, "Sir, that home sells for $42,350." And he says, "What? I paid more for this car." So I realized, yeah, maybe we had some upward space there that we could raise our prices. So thank you very much, Mr. Texan. I appreciate that.
That that theme, that genetics within the, the body of the community, did come about and did express itself in another iteration when we built the cultural center, the Circle Square Ranch Cultural Center. We started expanding the community, moving from attached villas into single-family homes, and building a range of single-family homes. All the way nurturing our fitness programs, our cultural and arts programs. And finally, we reached a level of homes in the community where it could sustain an arts program, a consistent arts program. We built the cultural center, a 950-seat auditorium with stage, phenomenal sound system, projection, production capabilities. And we started bringing in national acts as well into this.
Which was one of the points. But the other aspect was not just the entertainment side of the community, because that's important enough, but empowering people, empowering our residents to cultivate their creativity. This was a really important function. We packaged the programs. We had, I'd been to a conference out in San Francisco. It was sponsored by Civic Ventures, which Mark Friedman, I'll mention by name, great, great guy, great visionary, pulled that together. And what he was about was saying, you have all these seniors in these communities, you have this wonderful coming together of experience, unparalleled in this country in history. And there's an opportunity to keep people involved and to harness this energy and bring it back into communities and build better communities, more civility, stronger communities, more sense of place. And we certainly buy into that because we were doing so.
I told you a little bit about how we came to Ocala and how we started building townhomes and eventually villas. But the thing about the community, the Dad envisioned, he envisioned a community that was based around the arts. Yes, it had amenities, but the primary purpose was performing arts, graphic arts, anything that was creative. Because my father was a very firm believer that this artistic impulse that exists within human beings is a higher, a higher sense, a higher presence, a closeness to the divine, if you will, the divine being manifest in each of us. He's a very spiritual man. And so he wanted to build this community that had an emphasis on the arts, performance.
The other thing he wanted to do was to build a community that didn't need automobiles. You could park your car on the side, you can get around by golf carts or tram. And it didn't quite work out that way. You know, prying Americans' hands off their steering wheel, as as anybody will tell you, any urban planner will tell you, is a real challenge. There's got to be incentives to do it. Nonetheless, we were very successful in promoting golf carts to the point that at one point, 50% of the vehicles on the road and On Top of the World were golf carts. Still a very high percentage today. And that's an important point.
We also went on building amenities. We built an 18-hole golf course, followed by another 18-hole golf course, followed by a third 18-hole golf course. We built a very large recreation center and pool complex in its day for that, from the 1980s. And it had a large performance center, it had a fitness center. Which is really important because the thing that my dad learned in the first On Top of the World of Clearwater was, yes, he amenitized the community, yes, they had classes, yes, people were engaged, and yes, it improved their quality of life. But what he saw as lacking in that was an aspect of physical fitness. As he said, "I can't increase your life by one day. I don't know if I could do that, but I can certainly increase the quality of your time."
So we created, and I say we because of my father and I, created what may be the first consolidated, concentrated fitness program for seniors in the country. And it was right on site, on Top of the World. We acquired the first generation of Nautilus equipment. And Nautilus, I mean, that was a real breakthrough because that meant fitness could be somewhat genteel, but it could still be real fitness. And so we had the full lineup in our gym. We had weight machines, all kind of weight machines. We must have had 25 pieces or 30 pieces in there, together with treadmills and all kinds of other things. And we hired a fitness director into the program. And the fitness director, we gave them a lot of leeway. And he created a cardiac resistance exercise program, which is well ahead of its time. And the highest compliment we were paid was when the people who'd been in for cardiac surgery and were on the rehab track, when the physician had tell them, "You know, you don't need rehab anymore. You can finish your rehab in your community, On Top of the World. They have a phenomenal program."