(The following article by Laura Green was posted on the Venice Herald Tribune website on January 7.)
VENICE, Fla. — Sixty-eight years after his death, John Nolen’s legacy as one of the America’s most innovative land planners continues to blossom.
Nolen’s vision is seen in post-Katrina Mississippi, where planners want to revive communities by building self-sustaining cities with old-fashioned downtowns.
It’s evident in Orlando, where Celebration and Baldwin Park, communities with apartments above stores and restaurants, are among the hottest places to live.
And it continues to be felt in Venice, one of Nolen’s most celebrated planning efforts, where historians and others debate Nolen’s intentions with the passion of constitutional scholars seeking the thinking of the Founding Fathers.
Few have followed Nolen more closely than R. Bruce Stephenson, a professor of growth management at Rollins college, near Orlando.
Stephenson, 50, has studied Nolen for the last 19 years; he’s finishing a book about the planner called “John Nolen: The Promise of a New Urbanism.”
Having accepted an invitation to speak this month in Venice, Stephenson is scheduled to share Nolen’s vision at a time when the city is wrestling with its future. There is heated debate on how to redevelop the land along the Intracoastal Waterway, how far to carry a North Italian architecture mandate and whether to limit building heights.
Nolen designed parts of Savannah, Ga., Charlotte, N.C., and San Diego. But none of his work was as all-encompassing as Venice, which he essentially designed from scratch in the mid-1920s as part of a plan by the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers to build a luxury community for its members.
Nolen laid out communities based on symbiotic relationships. He built apartments and smaller homes for the working class who manned the restaurants and shops that served the city’s more affluent.
He centered homes, businesses and entertainment around a dense core, leaving nature to run free around the edges.
A landscape architect by training, Nolen sought to preserve large pieces of natural habitat at all costs.
He famously wrote about man’s tendency to consume his environment unchecked.
“It has been said and with reason that man is the only animal who desecrates the surroundings of his own habitation,” Nolen wrote.
While his designs were sought after, they weren’t revolutionary in a day when people traveled by foot or public transportation and only the wealthy had access to cars.
But in today’s landscape of faceless strip malls, bumper-to-bumper congestion and gated enclaves, the past has become prelude for land development.
In what Stephenson calls a “Nolen Renaissance,” the planner’s philosophy is regaining prominence today as an antidote to suburban sprawl.
“John Nolen had a very intelligent, well thought out vision for he future of the America. I think it was only partially realized due to historical conditions,” Stephenson said.
The Great Depression brought an end to the building boom. Many of the cities that commissioned plans from Nolen never finished building them.
But some communities are beginning to rediscover his vision.
“The time is now much more conducive to look at his vision than when he introduced it,” Stephenson said.
Forward-thinking developers have begun seeing the value of building dense cities with active downtowns rather than adding to the the sprawl and tapping a dwindling supply of water and land.
This month’s visit to Venice won’t be the first for Stephenson. He regularly brings students from Rollins’ campus to see what he considers one of the best examples of Nolen’s legacy.
“Venice was kind of his masterpiece,” Stephenson said.
But even in an original Nolen community, there is debate over what the planner intended.
“We need such a speaker to enlighten us about what John Nolen’s plans really were,” said Betty Intagliata, president of the Venice Area Historical Society. “Sometimes people read a little bit and it gets misconstrued.”
That’s why the historical commission sought a grant from the The Florida Humanities Council to bring Stephenson to town.
While Nolen supported dense development in the city, Intagliata said developers are missing a key piece of that decision. Nolen designed Venice as a community for people of all incomes, she said.
Intagliata fears developers’ plans for million-dollar condos in the apartment district will push out what little affordable housing is left in the city.
“If they go by the wayside, what’s going to happen to workforce housing?,” she asked.
Venice is growing both in population and land mass, with the city continuing to annex land. Stephenson said the city must find a way to grow while staying true to Nolen’s design.
Nolen never worked with existing buildings in Venice. He designed the city from farm land. But Stephenson guesses Nolen wouldn’t rule out older buildings as long as the new buildings are in keeping with the scale of the surroundings.
Stephenson said city planners should use Venice’s 1920’s hotel, which has been converted into the Summerville senior living center, as a guide for how tall structures should be.
Nolen believed in landmark buildings that set the tone for a city. Other buildings would have been smaller scale and less ornate, he said.
Nolen’s eye for detail came from his appreciation of art. He studied Michelangelo, Stephenson said.
With such a timeless artist as an inspiration, Stephenson said, there’s little question why Nolen’s designs continue to resonate today.
“I’d have Venice be as strict as it can to keep its heritage,” Stephenson said.