A History of Lakeside Preserve (Lakeside Townhomes)

Lakeside Preserve Townhomes:

from Conception to Completion

Towards the end of the last century Bayfair Homes/Properties, , a Tampa firm since 1989, thought to expand their success as a townhouse builder in South Tampa and Harbour Island by creating a similar, if perhaps slightly less expensive, townhouse community in the Carrollwood area. Bayfairwas then and is now headed by J. Michael Morris, with David Seidenberg as its executive vice-president.

The company bought the essentially vacant Orange Grove Drive site of our townhouse complex in June, 1999 for $980,000 from Dr. Esfandiar Shafii, a local cardiovascular surgeon, and his spouse. Mr. Seidenberg recalls a few tumbledown structures on the lot, whereas Reggie Rubio, one of our earliest residents, retains an image of aging, scattered citrus trees. The nearly rectangular parcel—about 330’ x 800’, a bit more at the Orange Grove end, but minus a small rectangle on the northeast—contains about six acres. A slanting shoreline leaves about half the piece in Lake Ellen.

Early plans, announced in the Aug. 2, 1999 Tampa Bay Business Journal, were for “48 luxury ... two-story homes with 2,000 to 2,700 square feet and three or four bedrooms, two or three baths or half-baths, and two-car garages. Pricing is expected to start in the low $200,000 range.” Except for building only 47 townhouses, Bayfair adhered to this program.

Engineering and development of the site took about a year, and building construction was authorized in September, 2000. The first three unit building, to the left or north of the entrance and backing Orange Grove, was completed in 2001, and construction proceeded clockwise on both sides of the 3400 block.

Construction of the three-unit lakefront building at the north end was deferred until after the 3500 block because of wetland issues. A similar problem had earlier affected the location of the five unit building on the north side of the 3400 block.

A clockwise pattern of consecutive building, beginning on the pond side, was followed in building the 3500 block. The last Lakeside townhome was finished in 2003.

Construction and occupancy moved in tandem. Many units were sold while still under construction; others, within weeks or months. None languished.

Having completed construction and with almost every townhouse sold, Bayfair, in November, 2003, turned Lakeside over to its owner-residents and their homeowners’ association (HOA). The budget to maintain the complex, the exteriors of the buildings, the entry gate, the swimming pool, the cabaña, and all other common facilities and areas, became the responsibility of an elected board and its designated property manager

Today, there is a plethora of upper middle-class townhouses in the Tampa Bay area, but at the turn of the century there were few indeed, Bayfair’s Harbour Island development excepted. The typical local townhouse was built on 28 feet of frontage, had three rather than two stories, often no bedroom on the first floor, a carport or single car garage, 1,000 to 1,500 square feet of living area, and six to ten units in a building rather than two to six. Of course, it was also priced at a half to two-thirds of the original price of a Lakeside Preserve townhouse.

None of the foregoing is intended as criticism of what preceded Lakeside. It is simply a description of a different market, housing intended for another demographic: younger, often single, more transient, less security-minded, and perhaps less affluent.

Therefore, Lakeside filled a need: somewhat upscale if slightly downsized housing for an older demographic. Lakeside offered urban amenities without high-rise congestion. Its blend of freedom from lawn care, privacy, security, and convenience was irresistible to many of us.

LakesidePreserve and Heards Ferry Drive: We’re not alone.

Lakeside Preserve is an appropriate and marketable name with its connotations of lake front orientation and select location. Obviously, the name resonated with the planners of our community. Has it been similarly attractive to other real estate developers? If so, where?

A clue to the answer is our street name: Heards Ferry Drive. As street names including “Ferry” were probably once direct routes to river boat crossings, we might look for them in older river metropolises, and there is one that seems relevant. Just north of Atlanta, in Cobb County, Georgia, there is a street called Heards Ferry Road (not Drive). It runs east- west for a few miles between Sandy Springs, GA and a former ferry crossing over the Chattahoochee River.

The upscale homes on and near this road are on large, hilly, and well landscaped lots. In other words, it’s a photogenic street, and it may be one that the developers of our Lakeside Preserve knew well. Why else would our little tuning fork of a street have so unlikely a name?

So, if we want to look for similarly named Lakeside Preserves, plausible starting places would be in areas familiar to the developers of our townhouse community, such as the Atlanta and Tampa Bay areas. A developer’s objective could be to capitalize on an enticing name while avoiding confusion with a directly competing community.

Georgia’s Lakeside Preserve is a family-oriented golf course community of several hundred single-family homes priced from the mid-one hundred thousands to the mid-four hundred thousands in south Fulton County, a few miles west of Atlanta’s airport.

Closer to us is another Lakeside Preserve, not quite in Hillsborough County, but in northern Manatee, Parrish, FL. It is also a single-family home community, but smaller than its Atlanta counterpart and with homes selling in the two hundred thousands.

While we may not have a unique name, we are distinctive as probably the only Lakeside Preserve townhouse community in the Tampa Bay area.

Lakeside Townhomes and Historic Lake Ellen: Al Capone, a Playground Beach, and Sheltering Unwed Mothers

Lake Ellen is the focal point of our 47 townhome community. We know it as a natural 51 acre lake with good fishing, a long view across, and perhaps a few alligators, but not so many as to discourage water skiing or an occasional canoe or kayak. We enjoy our dock and cabaña on it and our over 300 feet of lake frontage.

But there’s more to the story. This lake that we appreciate but may take for granted is rich in history. First, urban legend has the shores of Lake Ellen as a reputed home or getaway for the notorious gangster Al Capone. (See [B] on the map for this story). Second and far more reliably, we know the lake was the site of one of Tampa’s most popular beaches, drawing large crowds from as far as MacDill Air Force base [C]. Third, Lake Ellen had a major and controversial Salvation Army facility on its eastern shoreline, one of several Booth Homes for Unwed Mothers [D].

Consider Mr. Capone. Early LakesideTownhomes residents may recall the 2003 fire on a log cabin being remodeled on the now vacant property just south of us. Allegedly, Capone hid away there [B] and directed activities from that cabin during the ‘20s. This statement and a similarly scandalous one about a 1920s nudist colony in other Stall Rd. homes may be just so much urban mythology, but the Tampa Bay Times (then the St. Petersburg Times) found enough credibility in them to mention both rumors in a 2003 article.

More reliable are two other statements about the eight acres bordering our southern property line. All nine homes in the former Lake Ellen Beach Park once belonged to a professional trumpeter in in a cruise ship band. When he sold most of them in 1976, the residents formed one of Hillsborough County’s first homeowner associations as a condition for becoming a county- approved planned unit development.

Next, our beach. In the days before Ben T. Davis Beach (opened 1949) on the causeway to Clearwater, there was no close-in facility for Tampa sand lovers;

Clearwater Beach was a trek. Locals understandably looked to the lakes north of Tampa for swimming, boating, and water sports. Two popular recreational lakes were Egypt Lake and Lake Ellen, and the privately owned Lake Ellen Beach [C] attracted visitors from throughout Hillsborough County.

Today, townhouses visible from our dock stand on the north side of Lake Ellen Drive, where the beach was located. Lake Ellen seems deeper on its south end than at our complex, and the tall diving platform with a slide on its shore end, pictured here, had been erected.

During World War II and for a few years afterwards, the beach was a popular hangout for MacDill troops and the teen- agers they attracted. However, it could not compete in the long run with the attractions of causeway and Clearwater beaches, and the property became the site of the town homes now on the south shore.

Continuing counter-clockwise around Lake Ellen, we encounter the former site of the Tampa Salvation Army Booth Home for Unwed Mothers [D]. That building was razed almost ten years ago. This recent photo of the land where it stood shows a large house and roofs of buildings to the south. The site has room for additional homes.

For perhaps four decades a facility for unmarried pregnant young women was housed at the west end of Lake Ellen Lane, one of more than thirty such Booth Homes spread around the U.S.A. These homes, named after the Salvation Army founder, were always controversial, condemned by rigid moralists as “encouragements to vice” and by some social workers as facilitating a baby farming enterprise. Adoption was (depending on the person commenting) somewhere between encouraged and required. Today, when slightly over 40% of live births in the U.S. are to unmarried women and most of them raise these children to maturity, these earlier attitudes may seem difficult to understand.

Other criticisms came from homeowners who objected to what they regarded as institutions that depressed local residential property values. Nonetheless, at a time when the unmarried and pregnant were often fiercely stigmatized, these homes provided a supportive and sheltering environment to young women often rejected by their families and society.

In any event, in the 1970s the Salvation Army recognized that societal values were shifting, and the organization planned a nationwide gradual phasing out of the Booth homes. The Tampa home became the Army’s state headquarters, and more than 100 employees each workday as well as emergency vehicles traveled two-lane dead end Lake Ellen Lane to the eleven acre site.

Meanwhile the combined impacts of neighborhood objections, an old facility designed for other purposes, and difficult access motivated the Army to find another site, and they eventually moved their operations to a purpose-built office facility on Van Dyke Rd. The Lake Elle Lane site has been rebuilt with single family homes.

Folks interested in knowing more about the history of our area may want to read an informative recollection of growing up near Lake Ellen by Barbara Stover. Ms. Stover’s sympathetic memoir, entitled “Lake Ellen Narrative,” is on the web at <https://s3.amazonaws.com/ wateratlasimages/lake_ellen.pdf>.