- November 17, 2024
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Wearing a camouflaged hunting cap, Leo Fleurie sips a small cup of coffee on a cool morning at the beach on 16th Road, with the Hammock Beach Resort towering in the distance behind him. He wears brown leather work boots and a stained denim jacket. In his right jacket pocket he has a second cup of coffee waiting for him. Every day, he rides his bicycle to the beach and watches the pelicans congregate on the sand. Having lived in Flagler County for 63 years, he’s living the good life.
But the night before — actually earlier that same morning — the County Commission took a vote that he believes will threaten his peaceful paradise. As a result of the vote, the lodge near the parking lot at Old Salt Park can be expanded to about twice as wide, though not any taller, and will bring more visitors to the beach.
“You can overcrowd a place,” he said. “Like a mall — that’s what’s going to happen here.”
He is suspicious of the developers’ intent. Even though the scope of the proposed project will not infringe on the public beach access point or on his ability to ride his bicycle there, “everything’s subject to change,” he said. (Any significant change in development plans would have to come before the County Commission again, and a few attempts have been denied already in the past, including a hotel proposal in 2010.)
But Fleurie’s attitude also reveals a clash between classes of people, an aspect of the hotel debate that not a lot of people are talking about: the top 1% of privileged America buying beach access once enjoyed by humble Old Florida folk.
Blue collar ‘jealousy’
Fleurie is an electrician, effectively retired, but not by his own choice. “They don’t want you around when you get up in years,” he said.
At the thought of someone building a hotel close to the beach, he asks, “Who has that kind of money? It isn’t me. It isn’t the average person. When you’ve lived here all your life and all of a sudden a rich person comes and says you’ve got to go, you just want to kick somebody’s butt.”
He acknowledges that he isn’t being asked to go anywhere, exactly. But he may feel less and less comfortable at a beach where, decades ago, he used to ride a dune buggy that he and his brother made from old airplane tires and a truck body, and where now, just a few hundred feet from Old Salt Park, matching blue beach chairs are stacked high, waiting for the resort staff to lay them out for the private guests.
His word for why some Hammock residents oppose the hotel? “Jealousy.”
“I just don’t want it to look like it’s from New York City,” he said. “Rich people never seem to be satisfied. They always think they can make it better and bigger.”
Ten minutes from Old Florida
Fleurie finished his first cup of coffee and threw it in the garbage can and then rode his bike away from the beach. He passed the lodge, and then the towers, with million-dollar condos on the fifth floor. He rode with no hands, up and down the contoured sidewalk, in and out of manicured grass and bushes. He sipped on his second cup of coffee as he rode.
When he reached State Road A1A, he looked both ways and then crossed directly to the other side, where, unknown to many Flagler County residents, 16th Road continues on the west side of A1A. Before the road dead ends at the Intracoastal Waterway, Fleurie turns left on his bicycle on Sanchez Avenue.
And now, after this 10-minute bicycle ride, he is in a different world altogether, a place inhabited by a class of people much different from “resort people.” Sanchez Avenue is a dirt road. At the corner lot, behind a chain-link fence, dozens of chickens roam about the yard, and a rooster crows. Mobile homes rest under a majestic canopy of mature oak trees and Spanish moss.
Fleurie lives in a small house, built in 1982. It’s got about 1,200 square feet, with no heating or air-conditioning listed by the property appraiser. “Want to come in and look at the house for minute?” he says. “There’s a big ol’ fire place.”
A white trailer sits across the dirt road, with shingles that seem out of place, as if they belong on a more expensive home. The windows are broken out, and white curtains are torn. A neighbor bought the trailer, Fleurie said. “Someone was going to fix it up for their daughter, but when they found out how bad it was, they stopped working on it.”
Inside, Fleurie is proud of the flooring in one corner of the home. He planed the wood himself. He also built a handsome high-backed bench from a tree. Two old rifles, given to him by a friend, hang above the fireplace.
One of Fleurie’s next projects will be to make a birdhouse from wood that he acquired from an unlikely place. Ty Pennington, a famous TV carpenter who hosted “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” on ABC, is building a house in the Hammock. Fleurie rode his bike near the construction site one day recently and noticed how much wood was being discarded.
“I asked if I could have the wood from his dumpster, and he said yeah,” Fleurie recalled. But Fleurie has misplaced the wood. Searching for it, he walks through his cluttered backyard, past other finely crafted wooden chairs. He ducks under the drooping, brown fronds of a banana tree, through a canvas-roofed tent on a metal frame, and through a maze of piles of wood and into a shed that is larger than the family room/dining room/kitchen area of the house. Lumber is stacked all around, waiting for Fleurie to build something, though he hasn’t decided just what to build with it yet.
Then he remembers: He left Pennington’s wood scraps on the front porch. “Look at that finish,” he says, rubbing his hand along the honey-colored grain. “That’s what Pennington is using for the inside of his walls. They didn’t want this piece because of that little crack. Can you believe that? I wouldn’t worry about that.”
‘It’s everybody’s beach’
Fleurie is practical, a hard worker. He’s pleased with his workshop, his yard, his humble home. But things are changing all around him. In the lot next to him, a consignment shop with an apartment is being built. And, of course, there are plans for a new hotel at the beach. A wider building, full of wealthy visitors in increasing numbers.
In the screened-in porch, an Everlast punching bag leans against a wooden bench. Fleurie sits on a porch swing and looks at a frame containing several old pictures, some black and white, and some in faded hues of orange and blue. One photo is of Fleurie as a young man, holding a raccoon, and standing in front of the dune buggie outfitted with airplane tires.
“I don’t mind someone coming in to build a house,” he said, “but when you have someone coming and building something like this, it’s kind of disheartening.” He added: “I believe it’s everybody’s beach. But the people with money think it’s theirs.”
