From the desk of Daryl Rose Davis:
Seaside did not exist when I moved to the Panhandle of Florida in the summer of 1980. I was relocating to join my husband, Robert, in his vision to build a holiday beach town like the ones from his childhood. He spent many happy summers in the sand with his extended family, whereas I had never seen a beach until I moved to Miami at the age of nine. My playtime was on the street in Brooklyn, where I grew up, or in front of my grandparents’ houses—a strictly urban type of holiday that did involve an extended family, but not just mine. I lived in a nine-floor apartment building whose residents were all very proprietary toward the children there. Any of them was capable of giving us a quick reprimand or tossing some spare change out the window for the Good Humor man. I think ice cream cost a nickel back then, so a kid’s eye could follow the coin as it landed on the sidewalk.
Robert was a real estate developer of small condominium complexes in Coconut Grove. I had just finished my master’s degree in community counseling and was working as a children’s therapist.
From 1978 to 1979, we took some time off and traveled extensively through Italy, France, and the southeastern United States. In Europe, we studied life in small villages and beach towns. Each had a uniqueness, dependent partly upon geography. Venice had floating gondolas selling fruits, vegetables, and fresh fish. Smaller towns had dozens of vendors who set up stands in the center of the community twice a week. Not all were selling food; some had clothing, drugstore items, and pantry wares. These portable vendors supplied the townspeople with what they required for their daily lives. Many towns did not have the retail infrastructure to support citizens’ needs, but these biweekly markets usually did.
European beach towns were different. For the summer season—June, July, August, and the first two weeks of September—the inland cities and small towns were practically abandoned while Europeans took to the water. Some beach towns were absolutely stunning, including Portofino, Forte dei Marmi, Saint-Tropez, and Nice. These were exquisite little towns with shops full of lovely wares and restaurants with expensive upscale menus. But for every fancy holiday escape, there was a middle-class version with loads of restaurants, shopping venues, entertainment for a wide price range, and activities that many families could enjoy.
In the southeastern United States, we visited Savannah, Charleston, and New Orleans, as well as tiny Thomasville, Fairhope, Daphne, and Mount Dora. Joining us on some of our travels were town planners Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, who worked with Robert on some projects in Miami and became some of our earliest Seaside co-visionaries. We saw so many small towns that I cannot remember all their names. Still, I remember they possessed elements of a life well lived: beautiful public parks in the center of town, handsome state buildings, and housing made of vernacular architecture suited to the area and climate.
These years of European and stateside travel fostered my imagination with many visuals of how a small beach town in Florida could look and feel. After our travels, Robert and I had a name for this town. We called it Seaside. The place was now formed in my consciousness, along with the conviction to build it. My training was as a community psychologist and not in architecture or urban planning, but somehow I could visualize this monumental endeavor and not feel overwhelmed by it. I attribute this to Robert’s good sense of beginning development with only the first street, which we named Tupelo.
In 1981, we had two houses under construction on Tupelo Street. One was slated to be used as the sales office, and the other became a model home and our residence. Robert was busy directing contractors, lining up subs, and dealing with a million details that absorbed his life, while I was at a loss as to what to do with myself. I had worked every summer since I was sixteen and hoped that when I moved to the Panhandle, I would find work and use my newly acquired skill set in counseling or social services. This didn’t happen because the county did not offer social services.
I decided to use my time to develop a veggie stand on the isolated road of Highway 30-A. We knew we wanted to build a community as soon as we started building our first cottage. The location I selected for the stand was directly in the middle of the southern end of our eighty-acre parcel, where we determined the center of Seaside would be. I set up on the Gulf side of 30-A, one-fourth mile from the first houses on Tupelo Street.
Little did I know that would be the beginning of a journey spanning forty-plus years to develop and evolve The Seaside Style®.