|
Preservation Hero: The Champion of Venice, Florida In Torrington, Connecticut, in the 1940s and ’50s, “you could walk to everything,” Betty Intagliata recalls of her childhood. Intagliata, a retired teacher and businesswoman, now mourns this vanished ideal of American towns and cities, many of which have lost downtown stores and services to suburban malls. That was among the reasons that Betty and her husband, Paul, who now live in Venice, Florida, have fought to preserve the intimate scale and layout of their adopted hometown. Intagliata, who had formerly served on the Manchester, Connecticut, city council, immersed herself in the community after moving to Venice in 1981. It began when, as local business owners, the Intagliatas became active in the downtown merchants’ association. As president, Betty successfully pressed city officials to apply for the Florida Main Street Program. Spawned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Main Street programs stress historic preservation as a cornerstone of economic redevelopment. “The idea was to attract residents downtown, so that businesses could compete with the malls,” she says. Paul Intagliata served as Venice Main Street’s first president. Increasingly drawn to historic preservation, Intagliata served on, and later chaired, the Venice Historical Commission (now the Historic Preservation Board), an advisory board to the city council. During her fifteen years on the commission, she worked on wide-ranging projects, including overseeing the production process she learned more about John Nolen (1869–1937), one of the country’s first town and city planners, who had laid out Venice in the 1920s. The beachside city embodied the planning precepts outlined in Nolen’s book New Towns for Old (1927). Its compact urban center provided efficient circulation and views to fields and beaches. Abundant parks, a centrally located train depot, varied housing, and street-level stores created mixed-income neighborhoods where people could walk to shops and services. Intagliata helped found the Venice Area Historical Society in 1990, serving twice as president. Meanwhile, a population boom was pushing Venice beyond its historical boundaries. In 2005, as public debate about the city’s growth intensified, the historical society bought copies of the new LALH edition of New Towns for Old and distributed them to city officials, along with literature about New Urbanism––a planning movement that advocates pedestrian-friendly downtowns and other principles espoused by Nolen. “I feel that education of both the citizens and their elected officials is the key to changing how to deal with growth,” Intagliata says. She also wrote grants to fund public lectures by Nolen scholars Bruce Stephenson and Charles D. Warren (author of the new introduction to the LALH reprint), who spoke to packed halls. In February 2007, Intagliata organized a seminar on New Urbanism that drew more than a hundred people, including city and county officials. The historical society also supported the nomination of Nolen’s Venice plan to the National Register of Historic Places. Far from winding down, Intagliata has shifted her formidable energies to the county level. After wrapping up a two-year stint as chair of the Historic Preservation Coalition of Sarasota County, which unites twenty-one preservation organizations, she moved on to the Sarasota County Historical Commission and helped organize a 2007 statewide conference of the Florida Trust for Historic Preservation. “Of course,” she says, “I lined up a speaker on Nolen.” (See related article.) Photographs: |
