Residents of the The Moorings Yacht and Country Club and their guests were treated to a fascinating glimpse of the past earlier this month when Leonor Lobo de Gonzalez gave a talk about the intertwined histories of her family and the highly-regarded 1,160-home island community.
Gonzalez’s droll delivery had an audience of several hundred that packed the Commodore’s room in The Moorings Club erupting in laughter every few minutes and listening with rapt attention in-between humorous moments.
One of the highlights of her talk was the revelation there is a doppelganger Moorings development in Naples, which was created earlier by the same people who built our Moorings and includes many of the same street names and other features, right down to the par-64 executive golf course.
She also revealed that most of the mature shade trees in Vero’s Moorings came from John’s Island, where they were being removed to open up home sites, and that the success of Moorings – which struggled to get off the ground in the early 1970s – rests in large part on a surprising piece of advice John’s Island developer Lloyd Ecclestone gave to Gonzalez’s husband.
The outlines of The Moorings history are fairly well known: Gonzalez’s father, Julio Lobo, a fabulously wealthy sugar producer and financier in pre-communist Cuba, bought 538 acres of rat-, snake- and alligator-infested swamp five miles south of Vero Beach in 1957, partly to get some of his money out of Cuba as Fidel Castro’s forces gathered strength in the mountains outside Havana, partly because he thought it might be a good long-term investment.
Beginning in the late 1960s, the property was developed, via dredge and fill, as an upscale residential community mainly by Gonzalez’s husband, Jorge Gonzalez Diez, who managed the project from 1971 to 1984, when it was sold to a group of Vero Beach investors headed by construction company owner Donald Proctor.
Proctor’s group continued development, building The Anchor and other neighborhoods over the next 10 years. In 1994, the ocean-to-river community was turned over to the homeowners and it has thrived ever since, with a wide range of housing choices, a beautiful country club with golf, tennis and yachting, and the best deep-water residential home sites on the barrier island.
In her entertaining half-hour talk Gonzalez added little-known details that gave the story added dimension and made it come alive.
She talked about how her father was deprived of the bulk of his fortune – an estimated $5 billion in today’s dollars – by a stroke of Che Guevara’s pen in October 1960 and had to flee the island the next day to save his life; about the family’s sojourns in Fort Lauderdale, New York City and Madrid where they settled for a number years; and about their arrival in Vero Beach in 1970 when her husband took a leave of absence from this brokerage job in Madrid to straighten out problems at The Moorings development, which was just getting underway.
A temporary task turned into a permanent occupation when Jorge took over management of the project.
Gonzalez said she was devastated when she realized she had lost her cosmopolitan life in the sophisticated Spanish capital and was now marooned in what she called the “god-forsaken lunar landscape” that was The Moorings when the swamp was first being dredged, with the muck piled inside seawalls to make residential lots.
Aside from a few early residents in The Moorings, her closest neighbors were five miles away.
“To say I was horrified is an understatement,” Gonzalez told the audience. “On [Vero’s] beachside, there was no Riverside Theatre and no museum. There was nothing except the Ocean Grille and the Driftwood and a smattering of shops on Ocean Drive. From the Riomar Club to The Moorings there was nothing but bush – A1A was a one-lane highway – though it didn’t matter to me what kind of highway it was, because I didn’t know how to drive.
“What did matter to me was that I was stuck in the boondocks. I used to go out on the barren anchor [peninsula] and just cry. There was nothing out there. You couldn’t see any boats or any human beings. There were only these hundreds of blackbirds circling. I thought where am I? And what am I going to do?
“Had I known that the best years of my life were going to be spent in this god-forsaken place I would have stayed home with Fidel Castro!”
The development had problems of its own. There were delays and difficulties with the dredging process and lots were not selling.
“Jorge was worried,” Gonzalez said.
The situation was dismal in the early 1970s, but Leonor Lobo de Gonzalez and The Moorings both rallied.
Lloyd Ecclestone and his son-in-law Roy Chapin were developing John’s Island at the same time, and having much better luck selling lots. So Jorge went to his competitor and asked for advice.
“He said, ‘Mr. Ecclestone, you have been so successful. Give me some advice. What can I do?’ And Mr. Ecclestone shot back, ‘double the price of your lots,’” Gonzalez said. “Jorge did double the price, and The Moorings took off!”
In another smart move, Jorge donated part of his land to St. Edward’s to construct an upper school.
“The lower school in Riomar did not have room to expand,” said Gonzalez. “Jorge very astutely thought if he had a school built here it would attract buyers, younger people with kids. So that is what he did. And the school was built.”
Six months later, the headmaster asked Gonzalez to come in for a meeting at his office. She was nervous about the meeting, fearing that her son Boris, a student at the school, was in some kind of trouble.
“He was a devil at his school in Madrid,” Gonzalez said. “And I thought, oh no, he is starting again!”
But the headmaster, Peter Benedict, did not want to talk about Boris.
“Much to my amazement he offered me a job teaching at the upper school,” said Gonzalez, who has a degree from Radcliffe. “I guess he must have investigated and found out I went to a good college. I was flabbergasted [by the offer], but I was so desperate and so unhappy that I immediately said yes without even thinking about it.”
The job turned out to be Gonzalez’s salvation, giving her an engaging occupation she enjoyed and connecting her to the community.
She recalls seeing her students coming to school in motorboats and holding armadillo races in their back yards.
“It was all very bucolic,” she said.
Gonzalez later earned a master’s degree from Middlebury College in Vermont and helped lead the movement to found an art center on the island that eventually evolved into the Vero Beach Museum of Art.
“That was tremendous fun,” she said of the fundraising and organizing effort. “Through the years, Jorge and I met wonderful people and made wonderful friends here and decided to make Vero Beach our permanent home. I have spent some of the happiest years of my life here, particularly at The Moorings, this former swamp that my husband turned into this paradise.”
That paradise was modeled to a considerable degree on the Moorings in Naples, a trend-setting, home-run of a development begun in the mid-1950s when Milton Link, a landscape architect turned developer who had designed gardens for Julio Lobo in Cuba, called the Sugar King in Havana and told him he had found a prime piece of land on Florida’s west coast.
Lobo flew up, took a look, and authorized Link to proceed. The 1,300-acre seaside development located north of old Naples between the Tamiami Trail and the Gulf of Mexico was a big hit, selling out by the late 1960s.
It is much larger than Vero’s Moorings with more than 800 single-family homes and more than 3,000 condominiums. It also has hotels and a shopping center integrated into its luxurious suburban landscape, but it shares many characteristics with The Moorings here.
In Naples, a visitor can cruise down Mooring Line, Springline, Anchor and Spinnaker drives, same as in Vero, golf on a similar executive course and swim, play tennis or dine at a like-minded country club.
Single-family homes now on the market there are offered from $800,000 to $6 million, while condos are going for $200,000 to $3.9 million. Single family home prices in Vero’s Moorings start at about $550,000 and go up to $4.8 million, the asking price for a spec home currently offered on reef road. Vero Moorings’ condo prices start at the same place as in Naples’s Moorings, but don’t go nearly as high, topping out at present around $650,000.
