Just one year ago, almost to the day, The Breeze published a special commemorative section marking the 60th anniversary of the Cape Coral Yacht and Racquet Club.

Prepared in conjunction with the Cape Coral Museum of History and written by Cape Coral City Councilmember Tom Hayden, a member of the museum’s board, the section highlighted the facility built and dedicated by the community’s founders, Jack and Leonard Rosen, brothers who saw what others had not — the potential for a waterfront wonderland.

Let us share some of the history Councilmember Hayden provided for the anniversary edition:

The dedication for the complex on Driftwood Parkway was held on June 10, 1962, just four years after the first family moved into the community’s first house on Riverside Drive. Nearly 2,000 welcomed the opening of what those first residents came to call “the hub and the heart” of their fledgling community.

As Councilmember Hayden pointed out, 2,000 was, well, pretty much everyone, and they were bedecked in their best to welcome a complex on par with a private country club.

Clubhouse replete with grand ballroom with a wall of glass overlooking the pool. Game and dining rooms. Tennis courts. A fishing pier jutting well into the river for anglers. A sandy riverfront beach.

All with free membership for those who also saw the potential in a community with still just a scattering of new homes.

“Many families spend small fortunes to attain similar Club benefits,” Gulf American Land Corporation President Leonard Rosen wrote in his letter welcoming club members. “Yet, as a Cape Coral homesite owner, you and your family can now enjoy all the wonderful facilities of our Club — without payment of membership fees or dues for three full years.”

The Cape’s population now has long crossed the 200,000 milestone.

The waterfront that was indeed a wonderland to Cape “pioneers” and those who followed, enticed by the natural beauty of the riverfront and the manmade attraction of 400 miles of machined canals, has become, well, too valuable to waste on the lawn-chair-in-the-sand, towel-by-the-pool, enjoy-a-community-barbecue crowd.

Cape Coral City Council has decided that the old Ballroom — where the Cape’s first clubs met, where many of the original churches held their first services — will go the way of the Cape’s other historic landmarks that have fallen one by one as the times — and their benefits vs cost equation — changed.

The Yacht Club, the city’s last-standing relic, will be demolished, Council decided by consensus Wednesday.

Not due to damage from Hurricane Ian as the public has been led to believe for months.

But from something as manmade as the canals that distinguished the Cape from all those other pre-platted, land-boom developments — neglect.

Millions and millions of dollars worth to bring the Ballroom back not to its former glory, but to repair the damage wrought by the city’s failure to maintain the “crown jewel” amenity it purchased from the developers in 1973.

To be fair, city staff refers to the repairs needed — from the roof above to the plumbing beneath — as “deferred maintenance.”

To be blunt, let us call it what it is — negligence.

Gross negligence of not only routine maintenance of the Cape’s lone remaining historic structure, which is bad enough.

But illustrative of the erosion of the bedrock upon which our now burgeoning city was founded: Its sense of community, its sense of people.

For while there was much the Rosens did wrong as they wrought a far-flung development from environmentally fragile land, they did understand one thing well: How to make growth not only profitable, but palatable.

That wasn’t just rooftops and restaurants, strip malls and shopping centers.

It was a planned and concerted investment in public places and spaces that capitalized on the natural and unique beauty that was Cape Coral.

The Yacht Club is more than a building, more than fading memories of grandeur past.

It is the remaining symbol of the philosophy on which a community, a city, was built.

Will the new Yacht Club complex, with its still-in-the-works concept pivoting to public-private partnerships for additional restaurants, a two-story community center to also serve as a bigger-better wedding or event venue, a waterfront walk around and a three-story parking garage be grand?

We think it will, indeed, be the destination its proponents hope for and more.

We will have a hub. Of that we have no doubt.

But will the new Yacht Club have heart, will it be a pulse of the community?

That’s the conundrum.

Swing too far and it’s not a destination, it’s commercialization, just another nice place to grab some crab cakes and a Chardonnay.

The real question before Council is where on the pendulum they — and more importantly, the residents — want to be.

– Breeze editorial

Editor’s note: This editorial has been updated to correct a date reference.