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Homes

Front Porch: Treasure vintage houses

By ELIZABETH BETTENDORF
Published June 3, 2005

One morning a few weeks ago, I sipped coffee on the terrace of my 1926 apartment building, the view of sailboats in the small harbor lovely, even peaceful.

Despite the fact that my job takes me into a lot of grand and beautiful new homes, I still love the oldness of the place: the stenciled cypress ceilings in the lobby, the way the light warms the pale pink stucco, my rattling old windows that sound like haunting flutes in a storm.

I am a child of Florida, born in Ocala and raised in Miami. Every day I walk the neighborhoods around Davis Islands and think about this state I love and how new is supplanting old so fast that I will wake up one morning and not know where I am.

One house I walk past belongs to Linda Alfonso, a longtime Davis Islands resident who cherishes her 1940s old Florida house. She loves the jalousie windows, the wrought-iron columns, even the stand of palms planted by the original owners, who owned a button and trim shop in downtown Tampa, where Alfonso shopped as a child with her mother.

"Sure, we could have bulldozed," Alfonso says. "But there was history here. And once you tear something down, it never comes back."

Don't get me wrong. Linda and her husband, attorney Jim Alfonso, decked out the inside of the house smartly and with flair. They painted the walls vibrant tropical colors, mixed in leopard prints and a crazy Victorian china cabinet and sought lots of help from local interior decorator, Shilah Stribling.

Mixed among the amalgam of old family possessions - Linda descends from the seven McMullen brothers who migrated to Pinellas County in the 1800s - are murals by Joanne Karpay and whimsical painted furniture by Davis Islands artist and longtime resident Eileen Goldenberg.

"Everything I have is something that means something to me. I even have a framed photo of my college roommate and my grandmother's 1907 Bible," Alfonso says. "When I walk in the door, seeing these things calms me."

The Alfonsos, both 57 and once Plant High School sweethearts, raised three children in the little waterfront house that sits on what amounts to a sleepy cul de sac on a canal.

But they've essentially left the house alone. The 1,800-square-foot home - expanded just 500 feet since they bought it in the early 1980s - has served them well. No fancy kitchen, bonus rooms or high-drama ceilings necessary here.

"That's just not us," she explains.

The other night after dinner, she sat out on her front step and ate an apple. Neighbors walked by, waved and stopped to talk. So did people she had never met.

"This is all I need," says Alfonso, who works part time at Serendipity on Davis Islands and teaches aerobics at Just Fit on Bay to Bay Boulevard. "I love coming home in the evenings and being able to crank open my windows. I love being able to manage my own house."

She knows that if they ever sell the house, whoever buys it will most likely fall for the waterfront view, not the old jalousies.

Most likely, she predicts, they will tear it down.

My Florida grandmother lived on Miami Beach in a similar vintage house she moved to in the 1940s. It was a glamorous house for its time, with a swimming pool and a waterfront view of a canal that spilled into Biscayne Bay.

A few years ago, I drove by and the house was gone - essentially replaced by a McMansion, though one exterior wall had been left standing in compliance with a weak preservation ordinance.

My only clue that my grandmother's house once stood in that spot was the address. Otherwise, it was gone, vanished in a glitzy Florida real estate boom that hasn't been seen since my grand Mediterranean-Revival apartment building went up as a hotel in the 1920s.

Last night, somewhere in the lull between thinking and sleep, I roamed through my Florida grandmother's house again, playing with my cousins sometime in the early 1970s.

We picked grapefruits and oranges in the yard and ran barefoot on the old linoleum kitchen floor.

If I could bring that house back again, I think I would want someone like Linda Alfonso to buy it.

Someone who wouldn't change a thing.

Or tear it down.

[Last modified June 2, 2005, 08:01:04]