History

A Hundred Years on the Gulf

The record is incomplete in places. That’s not an oversight — it’s the nature of a hundred years in a town that has been rebuilt after hurricanes more than once. What follows is what survives: in deed books, in a few water-stained photographs, in the kind of stories members tell each other at the Founders’ Table that nobody can quite verify and nobody particularly wants to.

1925–1926 — The Boom

The earliest surviving deed records the transfer of the Gulf parcel in late 1925. Construction began before the ink had properly dried. By January 1926, the courts were open, the east wing was occupied, and the name Altamar had appeared above the gate. The record does not identify who chose it. No later committee has improved upon it.

1926 — The Storm

The hurricane came ashore that same year and took the club’s east wing roof clean off, the way storms did to every wooden thing on that coast with some regularity. Most of what got built on a bet that year didn’t survive the bust that followed it. Altamar, undercapitalized and half-finished, should by rights have been one of the casualties. It wasn’t. Nobody in the surviving record explains exactly why.

1930s–1950s — Depression, War, and a Second Boom

The club’s courts stayed strung through the lean years. When the Army activated the airfield outside town in 1943, Altamar’s grounds went quiet for the first extended stretch in its short history, given over to young men who had never held a racquet and wouldn’t have cared to. It rebuilt in step with Naples’ postwar boom — a pool added, the kitchen expanded — for one decade the club that had improbably survived a bust became exactly what it was built to be.

  • Naples Airport, circa 1943

1960–2019 — Donna, and the Long Quiet

Hurricane Donna took the roof a second time in 1960, in almost exactly the spot the first storm had taken it. It was rebuilt again — by then, less a decision than a habit. What happened over the following four decades is the least documented stretch in Altamar’s history, which is itself a kind of answer. Nobody sold it. Nobody tore it down. It just got quieter.

2019 — The Gates Open Again

The courts came back to life in 2019. The clubhouse reopened. The name on the gate was the same one that had been on the deed since 1926. Whether that continuity is a matter of blood, of paperwork, or simply of people who found an old name worth keeping — the record doesn’t say, and Altamar has never seen much reason to clear it up.