It's Still Old Florida, but...

When Terri Rementeria returned to the United States after 20 years in Spain, she brought with her an appreciation of European culinary traditions, including cooking with only the freshest ingredients. It isn’t surprising that she opened a restaurant three years ago, but what might be surprising is her choice of location for Camellia Street Grill, which features ingredients straight from its garden, fish right off the boat, sautéed frog legs and Mediterranean collards.

Rementeria settled in Everglades City, which has a colorful history filled more with rugged pioneers, commercial fishermen, and drug smugglers and other scofflaws than with those of an environmentally and socially conscious bent.

Like others, she was drawn to Everglades City in part for its rural simplicity, and she’s one of a handful of entrepreneurs whose business is bolstering a green sensibility and sophistication in the Old Florida town on the western edge of Everglades National Park.

From Bust to Boom
The economics of Ever-glades City have often defied patterns. During Prohibition, fishermen acted as rumrunners. In the 1970s and early 1980s, they were also drug runners. In fact, many families in the town grew wealthy until the FBI shut down Everglades City in 1983, seizing 14 fishing boats, two airplanes and a half-million pounds of marijuana, and marching most of the adult men off to jail. That huge sting won unenviable national attention and precipitated a change of direction in the town’s temperament—and economy.

"The town got a bad reputation in the 1980s, and that was a shame, because those were God-fearing people, simple people, good people," says fishing guide Tony Brock. "But it was more money [to run drugs] than they’d ever seen, and they just couldn’t resist it."

In the next 25 years, Everglades City rebuilt itself as a tourist attraction where some commercial fishermen still operate (greatly hampered by governmental restrictions), and the sport-fishing industry has grown significantly.

In the past decade, the town has become a destination for wealthy part-timers or comfortable retirees likely to spend winters, and property values sailed high at the beginning of this decade,
says realtor Bob Wells.

"A lot of the people who work out of here had to leave because they couldn’t afford it; they go to places like Copeland," a small community inland of Everglades City, he explains. "And some of the old-timers had to move. They might be on a small, fixed income, and they couldn’t even afford to pay the higher taxes on the property."

Many of the town’s 500 or so residents work in the service industries. They operate the restaurants, shops, commercial-fishing boats, fishing charters, wilderness-tour outfitters, national park concessions and public facilities in the two-mile cluster that comprises Everglades City’s business center.

Along adjoining Camellia and Begonia streets, which border the Barron River, hundreds of crab traps are stacked beside the cramped huddle of docks and boats that stone-crabbers and commercial fishermen maintain. Cheek-by-jowl are eateries and storefronts for retail and commercial sale of the catch.

From late autumn to late spring, Everglades City is lively with real estate and tourism activity as well as with commercial fishing, crabbing and other traditional livelihoods that have given way to newcomers in much of Florida.

A Small Town
"What I love about this little town is its sense of community," says Francis Blackwell, manager of the Everglades Spa and Lodge. "I used to watch Northern Exposure on television, which was a neat show about a little place with all these characters where everyone had a story. Here it’s like that, too, only it’s Southern exposure."

What the two have in common is rural charm and wilderness. In Everglades City, those are major attractions and keys to its tourism and real estate economy.

The place was once so remote that, until Barron Collier agreed to finish building the western end of the Tamiami Trail in 1923, its few visitors usually came by boat to Chokoloskee. In return for completing the road from Tampa to Miami for the state, officials named Collier County in Barron Collier’s honor and picked Everglades, as the city was then called, as the county seat.

To kick off the work, Collier built homes and boarding houses for workers, along with buildings for businesses—such as the bank-turned-boutique-inn where Blackwell is now manager.
Everglades Spa and Lodge’s six rooms bear such names as the Trust Department, Dividends, Savings, Mortgage or Mutual Funds, and they go for $110 a night during season. The President’s Suite, where Collier kept his offices, is $135.

"To [find] a big shop or modern shop, you go into Naples," says Blackwell. "It’s not that far, yet we are in this pristine wilderness of an ecosystem that’s unspoiled mostly by developers. I hope it stays that way, but you never know. Look what happened to the Keys."

At the northern city limits, visitors cross a short bridge to see signs offering airboat rides. At the southern end of town, across from the touristy Oyster House and shops selling gifts or renting canoes, lies the western gate to Everglades National Park, where a ranger station welcomes visitors.
Many seek day and multi-day kayak or canoe adventures into the national park, requiring current charts, compasses or GPS equipment, and camping permits for the primitive sites along hundreds of miles of waterways. For those who prefer a little more comfort, a ferry-boat operator provides guided tours into the Ten Thousand Islands.

Call of the Wilderness
A unique wilderness has long been the area’s primary draw for both visitors and residents—including Sandy and David Harraden, owners of the Ivey House, the first green-certified lodging in Collier County.

David, from Connecticut, started working as a guide in 1979. "He’d had a difficult trip, because there weren’t people to assist the paddlers," says Sandy. David saw a niche, and started the business helping canoeists, advising them on routes, gear and the like. He expanded the business in 1989 with the acquisition of a small lodge, and met Sandy, a guidance counselor with two master’s degrees, who came from California for a trip he was leading.

"I feel I’ve come to know the Everglades well. People who use us are tapping into our expertise, and we have a staff of 25," Sandy says. "People don’t have money in this town; it’s not that kind of place. I don’t work for money. I’m here because I like what I do."

In 2001, they built a new inn with more modern comforts. It was certified a "green lodging" last year.

"We’re an ecotourism area, and we really feel strongly about preservation," she says. It’s also a move that would appeal to the Ivey House customers. They come from a range of areas and income levels, but what they have in common is an interest in and concern about the environment.

With the weakening of the U.S. dollar, she’s seen an increase in the number of Canadian and European visitors. But Europeans, many of whom have a stronger green sensibility and appreciation of ecotourism than mainstream Americans, have long been a mainstay for the Ivey House.

"They’re more interested in seeing the Everglades," she says. "There are people who live in Naples who have never seen the Everglades."

Blackwell has a similar guest roster at Everglades Spa and Lodge. "We have a lot of Europeans who come—Germans, French, British."

Those European visitors might find a comfortable familiarity at Camellia Street Grill.

"In Spain, I loved the camaraderie and the sensuality of cooking. Food is central to their lives. People work, but what keeps them alive socially and physically is food. I try to emulate that here," says Rementeria. "This is a tourist town, and they’re our butter and bread. I am a people person. I want my visitors to feel like they’re walking into their dining room."

Before marrying a Spaniard and moving to the Pyrenees, Rementeria grew up in Miami and spent time as a young girl with her grandfather in an Everglades City fishing camp. Now she operates the restaurant with her daughter, Naiara, son, J.R., who is also an airboat captain, and Naiara’s boyfriend, Ryan Mayberry, a maintenance worker for the U.S. Park Service who was born and raised in Everglades City.

"It’s a family business, a community business. Everybody helps each other, and food is central to our lives," she says. The transition from Spain to Everglades City was intimidating, she says, but she’s found a sense of community there.

"When I came here, I put [Naiara] in school in Naples. She was 16 years old. There was a lot of stress put on how they dress and what they drive, so I put her in the Everglades City School, with only 160-and-some-odd kids. She loved it. She went to every prom because there were only six kids in one class. Where else in the United States can you go the prom with your child and dance with them and eat with them and think nothing of it?" she says.

"As business owner, we all struggle here, but it’s worth it."

But market forces have begun to reshape Everglades City in ways that undermine the charms that drew Rementeria.