It might be hard for some to imagine Ponte Vedra Beach as anything other than what it is today. But half a century ago, it was even harder to separate Ponte Vedra “proper” from the amenities offered by the Ponte Vedra Club.
The Boulevard was the community’s backbone from Duval Drive down to Corona Road. If you lived on the beach side of the Boulevard, the front of your house faced the ocean, and the back of your house faced the road. The lower end of PV was west along Corona to LaMaster and back up to Christ Church.
Much of the area there, out to the A1A bypass, was undeveloped. The PV line then ran up and along the back fairways to behind the old PV billboard that stood facing north at 37th Avenue South. The boundary then cut back around to Duval Drive across from the open fields to complete the circuit.
Everything within this boundary was properly Ponte Vedra as it was first envisioned in and around 1928. This geography was so well established that by the 1970s, before Our Lady Star of the Sea Catholic Church was even named, there was some question about whether the parish would be “inside” Ponte Vedra or not. Behind the proposed future parish property on the A1A bypass, PV proper erected an eight-foot wooden-slat fence along the back edges of the western lots on LaMaster that cut all the way to Solano. This was PV’s back-edge. Not the A1A bypass itself, or the properties on either side there, but this wooden fence.
When Monsignor T. Leo Danaher first arrived in the early ’70s, he celebrated weekly Masses in a windowless wood-paneled former community hall with fluorescent overhead lighting that sat on the Boulevard across from the old Inlet. He also celebrated one of the weekend Masses at the Palm Valley Community Center. He lived alone in The Fountains down from Ponte Vedra Palm Valley Elementary and across from Thousand Oaks. At the time, that was certainly considered outside Ponte Vedra Beach. Altar boy training for the first group of Catholic boys of the right age happened in one of the smaller classrooms at Christ Church. Before Monsignor Danaher, St. Paul’s in Jax Beach served the Ponte Vedra and Palm Valley Catholic community.
PV in the 1970s was a 50-year-old environ in a liminal state, or so it seemed. There were vestiges of its mineral mining roots still mingling comfortably with the yet-to-be-realized dreams of Flagler’s vision for the First Coast. It was a post-wilderness, pre-boom leisure economy driven solely by the Ponte Vedra Club serving its members, guests, residents and visitors. As kids, we learned to watch out for the “guests of guests.” Experience told us that these were the ones who bent the rules a bit too far.
Members, guests, residents and visitors lingered in Ponte Vedra Beach because the stakes in PV felt real and rooted. Very little happened by accident, and the community never exploited any type of “paradise” marketing. PV thrived in “specificity,” and that mattered, because the dreams were always embedded in the details. Once lessons were learned, they were rarely forgotten. If they were forgotten, it showed they were never fully learned in the first place. Architects with clients in PV understood this. From the very beginning, there was always only a limited amount of space that could be filled up.
In the 1970s, catamarans on the beach at the Surf Club were a club amenity available to members and guests. For some, sailing was equally as popular as tennis, golf or swimming. The children’s playground, immediately below the adult pool, was sailing’s center and a favorite spot for many because it offered a rare commodity for everyone.
The playground was a respite from the demands of the more formal social-leisure happening around the pools, the patio and the sundeck areas of the Surf Club. It was a playground for kids, first and foremost, but it also functioned as a place for adults to revive memories, to sit quietly, to comfortably reminisce in a refreshing domestic breeze enjoyed under one of the two large “tiki-huts” thatched in cabbage palm fronds, or while sitting under the shade of the several very old cabbage palms themselves. Nothing was ever hurricane-cut and in the right micro-gentle breeze, the full-headed cabbage palms would begin squeaking as the frond stalks rubbed against each other. It was hypnotically repetitive with a sound as distinct as Simian chirps and with a cadence reminiscent of language. The perception was that the palms were communicating with their listeners. An experienced ear might describe this effect in one word, delightful.
From the service station, directly across the Boulevard at the corner of Miranda, the playground could be seen through a double-high chain-link fence. There were swing sets made of heavy steel tubing, a pair of wooden teeter-totters, a metal set of slides and a merry-go-round type spinning deck that spun dangerously fast before it was eventually removed entirely by maintenance. These were all things children needed to discover leisure play at their own pace. There was no public access to the playground from the Boulevard. The double-wide chain-link fenced gates were locked with a heavy padlock, used only by security and maintenance.
The catamaran storage was nicknamed the cat garage, perhaps as a nod to the service station across the street. This was the southern tip of the club property on the beach side of the Boulevard right before the private houses began.
The ground under the catamarans was grass and sand but it was thick turf near the playground equipment. Clean pits of white sand, edged regularly, separated the equipment from the turf. The sand was always kept well-groomed. Multiple pairs of heavily painted red wooden beach Adirondacks were always available but moved to new spots regularly to prevent turf wear.
There was a metal gate leading from the playground to the adult pool area that was kept locked except during special events. The beach in front of the playground was the site of the annual 4th of July fireworks celebration.
The PV bulkhead that runs the length of the beach from the top end to the site of the old Inlet served as the sidewalk to the playground. Each morning it was washed with a hose to clean off the overnight sand. Everything at the club was guest- and member-oriented and this hospitality was the core of the one Ponte Vedra experience.
There were half a dozen or so beachside changing rooms at the Surf Club available for daily rental along the ocean side of the adult pool facing the Atlantic. The low-profile, single-story construction of the Surf Club helped capture the sea breeze much like how a well-trimmed sail harnesses wind for forward motion.
A block-work wall between the adult pool and the playground exploited the Venturi effect, passively cooling the entire area. As air sped through the open concrete block construction, its pressure dropped. The lattice patterns in the breeze blocks acted as multiple small constrictions for air passing through the holes.
This effect created lower pressure on the leeward side, drawing even more air through the holes. In essence, the prevailing sea breeze was potentiated by the architecture’s brise-soleil, and it was the very reason the original Surf Club remained passively cool through the breezeway by the patio. The moving air flowed through the structure across the adult pool, into the playground and through the palm trees before finding its way out to the Boulevard and beyond. A principle of passive cooling championed by Ted Pappas. It was the Venturi effect by design. The ambience of the Surf Club in the 1970s was similar in style, theme and texture to the Ocean Club of Florida today, or the amenities happening on North Cat Cay, Bahamas. The specificity had developed over time and out of necessity in PV. Jalousie windows helped manage the airflow before a renovation of the adult pool area in the late ’70s replaced those windows with plate glass disrupting key effects of the architecture’s natural ventilation. The aesthetic of Addison Mizner’s revival style had not yet made its way to PV. That would take an additional 50 years and it would be as impactful as anything seen the 1970s in this smartly casual place of all places, Ponte Vedra Beach.
