Owners never spent night in riverboat mansion
AMY BENNETT WILLIAMS
awilliams@news-press.com
The pitch came in a four-page brochure filled with photos, diagrams and breathless prose:
“Unique and luxurious residence... Mississippi riverboat converted without regard to cost... a remarkable engineering feat... no longer a boat but a superbly substantial residence... 13 large rooms, five baths and enclosed decks of king-sized proportions... spacious, high-ceilinged rooms fitted with tremendous windows and glass doors... Hollywood-style bathrooms... restaurant-equipped kitchen... enjoys complete privacy on unspoiled Sanibel Island .. tremendous appeal for the investor or developer with imagination to realize its future potentials ...”
The Algiers was Sanibel’s first mansion, a peculiar bit of island history that began as a Sunshine State cliche: wealthy Northerners remaking their piece of paradise to suit themselves.
It all began in 1925 in a Cincinnati shipyard, where a workhorse boat was built to haul automobiles across the Mississippi. For 25 years, the Algiers had been a car ferry until a wealthy Boston couple with a fondness for quirky fixer-uppers bought it at an auction in 1958.
Lathrop and Helen Brown (she was a shipping heiress; he was a New York congressman and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s college roommate and best man) brought the 155-foot Algiers to the then-unbridged island in 1959, where they’d bought 25 acres after vacationing there. The site was on the southeastern shore, off Casa Ybel Road.
But before they moved the Algiers to her new home, they gave the rather plain boat a glamorous makeover.
“The architect William Frizzell did it; it was one of his first jobs,” says Gary Price, a former Sanibel councilman and city manager.
The Browns retrofitted the boat’s exterior with antebellum trimmings: a huge paddlewheel, feathered smokestacks and vintage gingerbread.
Inside, Frizzell created a mid-mod pleasure palace with Italian terrazzo tiles, French marble countertops and sinks inlaid with gold seahorses, and gold-plated dolphin faucets spitting softened water into bathroom sinks. There was an elevator to whisk people to the top deck, and a restaurant-equipped kitchen boasting a microwave — “one of the first microwaves on the island,” says Alex Werner, president of the Sanibel Historical Museum — and maybe in Florida.
To get the Algiers to its destination, the Browns had it pulled by tugboat to Sanibel. Along the way, according to a 1978 article in the Island Reporter, Helen insisted that the workmen play poker “as befitted a proper Mississippi riverboat.”
Then they hired crews to cut a channel through the island’s interior, which they filled in behind themselves as they went.
“They ticked off the conservationists,” says Werner, “and they also ticked off the fire department.”
Turns out the Browns had borrowed the volunteer department’s pump truck to help move water in the canal, but someone had parked it in high grass. It caught fire and burned to a crisp. To make amends, the Browns bought the department a brand-new one.
There was just one remaining detail before they moved in, Werner says. “They owned a house in Fort Lauderdale, and Helen wanted (Lathrop) to sell it first. So she sent him over there to sell the place,” he says, “and as the story goes, Lathrop traverses the Tamiami Trail and took care of it. Then he went to a pizzeria for dinner, came back with indigestion and died the next day at Lee Memorial.”
Broken-hearted, Helen returned to Boston, never to return to Sanibel.
“They never did spend a night in there,” Price says. “When I went in there in the 1980s, there were still mattresses in boxes against the walls.”
Helen fenced the place off and hired a watchman to patrol with a couple of Dobermans. Eventually, she put it up for sale for $550,000 and in 1979, when the newly incorporated city of Sanibel was looking to acquire more beachfront land, Price suggested they consider the Brown property. The deal closed in 1981. By then, the boat was dangerously dilapidated.
Though there was talk of using it as city hall or leasing it for a restaurant, it was beyond repair. So, after everything salvageable had been stripped and auctioned — “a lot of locals got windows and doors,” Price says — the city had the Algiers demolished in 1982.
“The contractor cut it apart with torches and hauled it off,” Price says. “There was a Bobcat pushing things around and the boards were so rotted, the whole thing fell through the deck. The driver about died of fright, but he was fine.”
The one building left standing was the servant’s quarters, which were converted into the restrooms at Sanibel’s Gulfside City Park — also known as Algiers Beach.
From the boat itself, just three scraps remain: the captain’s wheel, the anchor and the bell, which are now on display at the Sanibel Historical Museum.
And that seems about right to Price. “I usually want to preserve anything historical,” he says, “but this was faux history.”
Additional Facts
The cemetary
One of the region’s most interesting studies in contrasts is just a stone’s throw from the former site of the Algiers at Sanibel’s Gulfside City park.
A winding path leads through native vegetation to the island’s pioneer cemetery with a handful of well-tended graves.
As you read the names and try to imagine what those lives must have been like, you can hear gulls crying and kids laughing on the beach.
• Learn more: Betty Anholt’s book, “Sanibel’s Story: Voices and Images from Calusa to Incorporation,” tells about the cemetery and the stories of some of the pioneers who are buried there. It’s available in area bookstores and online.
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