Building Paradise

Building Paradise is a full-length historical drama about the three forces that shaped Venice, Florida, and how their rivalries, secrets, and sacrifices became the foundation on which the city was finally built. In August 1925, orthopedic surgeon Dr. Fred Albee stood on thirty miles of Gulf Coast wilderness and saw something no one else could see, a White City on the Gulf. He hired the most celebrated city planner in America, John Nolen, to make it real. What Albee didn’t know was that the men who would buy his dream were already hiding a secret that would destroy it. The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, the most powerful labor union in the country, had built a financial empire of thirty-five banks and left behind a four-million-dollar deficit no one had the courage to name. His successor buried it in the Venice deal, poured union money into a city rising out of Florida swampland, and watched it collapse when the land boom died. But the land itself had a prior claim. Bertha Honoré Palmer, Chicago heiress and confidante of presidents, had walked this ground in 1910, platted the streets in 1915, and named every road before any of them arrived. She died in 1918 and never saw the city she made possible. Building Paradise moves across two acts and three decades, from Albee’s original dream through the Brotherhood’s spectacular rise and ruin, to the moment the city finally holds. It is a story with no villains, only people who believed they were building something honest, and were right, and wrong, in ways they never lived to fully understand. This is the true story of Venice, Florida, and it has never been told on stage.