Old Naples on Foot: The Grid, the Banyans and the Avenues to the Gulf

Naples was surveyed in the 1880s by a group from Kentucky who had read about the fishing and decided to build a town on a strip of sand with no road to it. The grid they laid out is still the grid, and its single organising idea is that the avenues run east to west and terminate at the beach.

That means that in Old Naples you are never lost and never more than a few blocks from the water. Walk west on any numbered avenue and you will arrive at the Gulf. It is the most legible neighbourhood in Florida.

The walk

Start at Cambier Park on 8th Street South. Bandshell, tennis courts, big trees, free concerts in season. Head west on 8th Avenue South through the residential blocks — this is the good part, and it takes ten minutes.

What you are walking through is a mix of surviving 1920s cottages, mid-century Florida ranch houses, and a great many recent rebuilds in a style best described as expensive. The through-line is the planting: royal palms, coconut palms, and banyans whose roots have quietly renegotiated the terms of several sidewalks.

The beach ends

Every avenue between roughly 1st and 18th ends at a public beach access point. They are small, unmarked in any grand way, and mostly have a few metered spaces and a walkway over the dune. Locals have strong preferences between them for reasons that will not survive explanation to a visitor.

• The pier sits at the end of 12th Avenue South — the busiest access in the neighbourhood.
• Anything north of 5th Avenue South is markedly quieter at sunset.
• The southern accesses near Gordon Pass are the emptiest and the best for a long shoreline walk.

Historic buildings worth the detour

Palm Cottage on 12th Avenue South is the oldest house in Naples, built in 1895 of tabby mortar — a local concrete made from burned shell. It is run by the Naples Historical Society along with the Norris Gardens beside it, and it is open to the public. The Naples Depot on 5th Avenue South, the 1927 seaboard rail station, is now a small transport museum and it is free.

Where the neighbourhood ends

South of about 21st Avenue the grid gives way to Port Royal and the canal neighbourhoods — the water-access streets that back onto Naples Bay. They are worth a look on the map to understand the shape of the place: essentially the entire southern half of the city is built on dredged fingers of land, each with a dock at the end of the garden.

You cannot really see any of that on foot. The canals are private, the streets are cul-de-sacs, and the whole system is designed to be read from the water rather than the pavement. It is the best twenty minutes of any boat trip out of Naples Bay, and one of the few times an architecture tour and a wildlife tour are the same trip.