On a recent Saturday, a backhoe plunged its metal teeth into one of the most iconic homes in Fort Lauderdale.
Tuscan columns collapsed, wood splintered, red brick walls crumbled.
The home, La Maison Blanche, or The White House, had become a Fort Lauderdale landmark over the years, its neoclassical pillars, vestibule and perfectly manicured lawn looking like a presidential palace on the Stranahan River as the house stood on a Rio Vista Isles promontory for all to see.
But no more: It has been demolished. In its place, developers are planning a massive and very glassy 20,000-square-foot modernist home replete with 12 full bedrooms, windows for days and an infinity pool on the second floor from which a waterfall spills into another pool below.
As the city’s waterscape changes, here’s a look back at how the people and money behind La Maison Blanche, which helps tell the story of Fort Lauderdale.
Selling the South Florida dream
These days, Rio Vista Isles, where La Maison sat, is a grid of man-made canals and islands where houses are listed anywhere from $2 million to $40 million, and where few, if any, residents mow their own lawns.
But back in 1923, when Fort Lauderdale had a population of approximately 2,000, what is now Rio Vista Isles looked more like the Everglades, a vast mangrove swamp south of the New River.
When developer William F. Morang set eyes on the mangroves, he saw money.
“All of the Rio Vista Isles would have been mangrove swamps, just like the isles of Las Olas,” said Patricia Zeiler, executive director of History Fort Lauderdale. “Morang dredged canals and built roads and bridges.”
Converting mangrove swamps and old-growth hammocks to houses was part of South Florida’s frothy early 1920s real estate boom — heady days for moguls like Morang, who could not have foreseen oncoming natural and financial disasters.
“In the late teens and early ’20s, there was a huge land boom in Fort Lauderdale. Perfect example — somebody would sell a lot in the morning for $300 and the seller would sell it in the afternoon for $600. Everyone was mad for buying property,” Zeiler said.
Morang was not shy about selling the dream of Fort Lauderdale.
In their book “Checkered Sunshine,” Philip Weidling and August Burghard quote one of Morang’s 1923 Fort Lauderdale real estate sales brochures: “Here we reach the very apex of scenic climax. Here Mother Nature ceased her efforts to excel herself … (she) stands forever pointing with unerring index finger to the city divided by New River as the Masterpiece of Her Skilled Creation.”
In 1924, the Miami Herald wrote that the swamps where Rio Vista Isles now sit were “being developed as a genuine replica of old Venice, with a modern touch of the well-paved boulevards in addition to the canals.”
Then in September of 1926, the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 hit. It was a Category 4 storm that barreled through Miami-Dade and southern Broward County, killing 64 people in Broward and leaving 800 people unaccounted for, according to the Broward County Historical Commission.
“That basically took the sail out of the entire real estate business … about 30% of the population of Fort Lauderdale was gone after the hurricane,” Zeiler said. “People lost their shirts and the economy basically collapsed here for three years before the Great Depression in 1929.”
According to History Fort Lauderdale, Morang is one of the builders who lost everything after the 1926 hurricane. In 1925, he had $13 million in his bank account. After the land bust he was broke.
“From post-1926 until post-WWII the building was very slow (in Fort Lauderdale),” Zeiler said. Construction in Rio Vista Isles stalled out. Initially the island where La Maison Blanche sat only had three or four houses on it.
The Rio Vista Isles lots were not particularly large, but the clientele still had money.
“Most of the folks who built in that time were not year-round residents,” Zeiler said. “Particularly the folks who bought the nicer lots on the water. They were winter visitors; you figure in the 1920s there was no air conditioning and no DDT. It was pretty miserable in the summer.”
Despite the hurricane’s impact, Fort Lauderdale’s population quadrupled in the 1920s to 8,668.
Buffalo Bill money
Nothing was built on the land at 1818 SE 10th St. until 1939. The man who had a vision for it, Ormand Gould, a New Yorker, first vacationed in South Florida, reportedly to watch a prize fight, and decided he needed to at least winter here.
Gould came from New York City publishing money. He was a northerner, a member of the Sons of the Revolution, graduated from Princeton in 1916 and served in the Navy as an ensign in World War I.
Gould added a couple other lots to the property to make it one of the largest lots in the whole development. He dubbed the property “land’s end” and on maps at the time is appears at Gould’s Point, and he and his wife Marion built a “red brick farmhouse” in 1939.
Gould’s grandfather founded Street & Smith Publications Inc. in New York, which, according to Gould’s New York Times obituary, first specialized in “pulp” tales in the form of magazines devoted to adventure and mystery.
According to a company blurb, they were the publishers of “the first story ever written of the world-renowned Buffalo Bill, the great hero whose life has been one succession of exciting and thrilling incidents continued with great successes and accomplishments, all of which will be told in a series of grand stories which we shall now place before the American boys.”
They also published The Shadow pulp series before pivoting to “slick” women’s magazines. Conde Nast bought the company in 1959.
In the 1940s and ’50s, Gould and his wife rubbed elbows at high society clubs in Miami and Palm Beach and were well known in Fort Lauderdale for throwing parties. They threw weekly Sunday open houses for flyers at the Naval Air Station, and even hosted a garden wedding and reception for Roger Firestone, son of tire magnate Harvey Firestone with Laurence Rockefeller as the best man.
They were also quite philanthropic, said Zeiler, and significantly backed the building of Holy Cross Hospital. Gould died in 1962 at the age of 70 and Marion Gould sold the house a year later.
La Maison Blanche is born
Before the eventual La Maison Blanche was built, the old house at 1818 SE 10th St. was owned by Gail & Ferge (Ferguson) Peters.
According to History Fort Lauderdale, Gail was the sister of former Fort Lauderdale Mayor and U.S. Representative E. Clay Shaw and Ferge’s family owned farmland where Plantation now stands, thus Peters Road.
In 1986, the Peters sold the property for $2,070,000, one of the highest prices ever paid for a home in Broward County, to James L. Hutchings, a man who made his fortune in Detroit producing air-conditioning parts for GM.
In an interview, Wesley Hutchings, one of James Hutchings’ four kids, recalls what the property was like when his parents bought it.
“All that was there was the original 1939 red brick house, the guest house and a tennis court. It was very small. It was like a red brick farmhouse.”
Hutchings and his wife, Barbara, turned the old red brick house into the huge neoclassical La Maison Blanche in 1989.
Wesley said his father moved the family business to Orlando in the 1970s, but that he moved to Fort Lauderdale in the ’80s because “he wanted his (business) headquarters down in Fort Lauderdale because he loved the Intracoastal (Waterway).”
Hutchings, it turns out, was blind, and the sound of the water and the boat traffic soothed him.
“That’s what my dad got the biggest kick out of, just sitting there listening to the boats go by, because my dad couldn’t see. He loved that kind of s***. He was blind at 35.”
He died at age 80 in 2018. Barbara, his wife of more than 50 years, stayed on in the extravagant mansion for another three years, but the house was falling apart.
“She heard everything break,” Wesley said. “She’d say, ‘Ah the god damn this is breaking today, now this is breaking!’ Wesley laughs at the memory now. “That’s why I said, ‘Mom, let’s look for a new house after dad passed on.”
Barbara sold the 16,534-square-foot house for $24 million in 2021. She now lives in Bay Colony, where Lionel Messi bought a house.
The developers who bought La Maison Blanche listed it on Airbnb for a pretty penny for a few years before demolishing it. They hope to sell the new house for $120 million.
Bill Kearney covers the environment, the outdoors and tropical weather. He can be reached at bkearney@sunsentinel.com. Follow him on Instagram @billkearney or on X @billkearney6.