Saving Cities Built on the Sea

By Tim Padgett/Biscayne Bay

Long before Hollywood dreamed up Waterworld, Laura Roberts grew up in it. Her family owned a stilt house in Miami's Biscayne Bay--one of seven that still remain in "Stiltsville," an eccentric collection of homes standing like flamingoes in the shoals seven miles off the coast. In Al Capone's day, the community doubled as an aquatic red-light district. Bygone booze-and-broads joints like Pierre's Bikini Club are etched in Miami's nefarious past. But today Laura, 35, and her husband Jeff, 36, use her family's stilt house as a weekend retreat, an octopus' garden where their children can angle for bonefish from the balcony and squeal at dolphins that come by like neighborhood gossips. "Some of us," says Laura, "still want a frontyard-backyard relationship with blue water."

That dream is as much a part of Florida as stone crabs and retirement condos. Which is why this summer even landlubbers are rushing to defend scores of stilt houses across the state, from Biscayne Bay to the Everglades and the Gulf Coast. Environmentalists want the state and federal governments to raze the structures, many of which are on public land, because they regard them as a messy human intrusion on Florida's delicate ecosystem.

But boosters insist the long-legged dwellings are a romantic reminder of how people and nature once harmoniously co-existed in Florida. "My son is studying to be a biologist because of the love for wildlife he nurtured out here," says J.R. Hinsley, a plant-nursery owner whose stilt house--a furnished, air-conditioned "hunt camp" he calls the Fontainebleau--sits above alligator nests deep in the Everglades, southwest of Boca Raton, accessible only by airboat. "People can call us swamp rats and rednecks all they want," says Hinsley's neighbor Don Kirk, 59, "but folks are supporting us because most of them live on top of asphalt today and we remind them of how Florida used to be--how they wish it was again."

Some "swamp rats," of course, have been known to treat the Everglades like a trailer park. But most, like Hinsley and Kirk, say they just want to preserve Florida's version of outback cowboy life--and a rare piece of history. Since the pre-Columbian era, the stilt house has been as much a part of the Caribbean waterscape as the windmill in Holland. Venezuela got its name when conquistadors marveled at the Indians' stilt huts and dubbed it "Little Venice." The Spanish dotted the Florida coasts with stilt houses, often built from wrecked galleons.

This summer Governor Jeb Bush cited stilt houses as historic landmarks and helped renew the 20-year, submerged-land leases for existing houses on state property. That, however, does not cover the 25-year leases for Stiltsville, which is in Biscayne National Park. Their expiration this year fired up the federal wrecking ball--and local protesters, who rallied to save the site. Carl Hiaasen, who has used Stiltsville as a setting in his novels, argues that the houses can be lifesavers. He and his son, he wrote in the Miami Herald, once survived a violent storm by tying their boat to a Stiltsville pile. Hiaasen noted that Stiltsville helps the park by warding boaters away from Biscayne Bay's ecologically sensitive flats--which is important because "no body of water in North America attracts more certifiable morons in high-powered yachts and speedboats."

Because of the outcry, Stiltsville's Congresswoman, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, has persuaded the park to extend the leases to December. She hopes to have a solution by then, perhaps redrawing the park's boundaries or winning landmark protection for Stiltsville.

Still, the environmentalists may have their way in the end. Stiltsville once had more than 25 homes, but most have been destroyed by storms, and lightning often turns Everglades stilt houses into charcoal. Humans may want to co-exist, but nature isn't always so eager.