Building Paradise

In 1925, an orthopedic surgeon named Dr. Fred Albee looked at a stretch of undeveloped land on Florida’s Gulf Coast and saw a city that did not exist yet. He was not a builder, not a planner, and not a man with unlimited money of his own. What he had was a vision precise enough to survive contact with other people’s ambitions, and that turned out to be the harder part.

To make the vision real, Albee brought in John Nolen, one of the most respected city planners in the country. Nolen laid the streets, set the scale of the place, and gave Albee’s dream its shape on paper. Building Paradise follows what happened once that shape had to meet the ground, the money, and the men who controlled both.

The money came from the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, a labor union with the resources to bankroll a planned city and, as the play reveals, a deficit it was not eager to advertise. The Brotherhood’s involvement turns Venice from an architect’s sketch into a financial gamble carried on the backs of people who never got a vote in how it was spent.

Woven through both stories is Bertha Honoré Palmer, the Chicago heiress who had platted these same streets and named these same roads years before Albee ever arrived, and who did not live to see any of it built. Building Paradise treats her as more than a footnote, she is the ground everyone else is standing on, whether they know her name or not.

What emerges across two acts is not a simple story of progress. It is a city built out of vision, debt, and inheritance in equal measure, and a reminder that every skyline worth photographing has a ledger underneath it that most visitors never see.