Fort Myers

Author Gerri Reaves compares Fort Myers, Florida from its beginnings to the urbanistic river community it is today.

In these photographs, the neighborhood service station, the drugstore soda fountain, and steamboat mail-delivery live on. Nineteenth-century storefronts stand amid condo towers. Cattle stroll to market, and post–World War II newcomers transform the paradise of Gilded Age millionaires and tin-can tourists. Fort Myers continues to reinvent itself, maintaining the treasures of its richly storied past.