Patti Smith (pictured in front of her home before Hurricane Ian and after the hurricane damaged her home) had to make the tough decision recently to demolish the cottage which her grandfather bought in the 1920’s. Photos provided courtesy of Patti Smith

Since the late 1920’s, Patti Smith’s family vacationed on Fort Myers Beach at their Miramar St. cottage on the beach side of Estero Boulevard.

While the family will always have those memories, the physical home they shared those times in is now gone – bulldozed recently due to the damage from Hurricane Ian.

Smith had to make the difficult decision due to the high cost of rebuilding to the new hurricane codes.

“I went back and forth, back and forth. I put business before my heart,” Smith said.

Smith’s grandfather Henry Jennings bought the home in 1928, while taking a vacation with his wife May from their home in Tennessee.

“We had no idea why he was there,” Smith said. “We figured he did it for my grandmother. He was not a beach guy.”

Smith, who grew up in Alabama, used to regularly visit the home for vacations after it was passed down to her mother Jeanette. Smith admits that her early memories of going to the beach were “miserable. There was nothing to do there” when she was growing up in the 1960’s, she said. She remembers a 7-Eleven and a Dairy Queen. After her mother died, her sister bought out the shares of her brothers for the ownership stake in the home. Her sister maintained the home, replacing windows and the roof.

About 15 years ago, the home was sold to a family from Wisconsin. Smith, who lives in Manhattan, decided to take a vacation in Fort Myers Beach “on a whim” a few years ago and saw the cottage was for sale. She visited the cottage with her brother and recognized old pictures, a vase, bowls, cabinets and furniture from when the home was in her family’s hands.

A religious experience fell over Smith and she decided to buy it back. An interior designer by profession, she did appreciate the cyprus wood that it was built out of now that she was older. “It was so charming inside,” she said. Smith said she had “no idea” why she felt compelled to buy it back, but felt as though she was sent there “to be enlightened” and to “find a resting place for myself.”

Smith renovated the home and started vacationing there and renting it out to others. The cottage became popular as a vacation rental for its proximity to the beach. During the covid pandemic, she stayed at the cottage for about three months. For the first two months of the pandemic, she said she was “petrified. I didn’t know what would happen to my business.” When caution tape when up at the beach accesses, Smith would go out to the edge of the beach access points with a chair to read a book. “It was so awkward” not to be able to go on the beach, she said. “It was the safest place to be.”

When Hurricane Ian came around, Smith was caught off-guard by what transpired. Her home did not experience a flood surge but the wind blew her roof off, damaged her deck and part of the frame of the home. Ian took a bite out of a strip of the ceiling in the front.

One of the keys to her decision to demolish the home was the uncertainty of whether she could build back on the ground floor. Her mother had begun work on a living space below the ground level, which was never completed. She estimated the cost to replace the roof at about $30,000 and the damage to the deck at $30,000. With FEMA’s 50-50 rule requiring the home to be built up to a higher elevation if more than 50% of the value of the home needed to be repaired, Smith made the tough call to demolish.

“I needed to be smart. I’m 62-years-old. I worked very hard. I don’t want to work forever,” Smith said. Her property is located in a commercial district of town. “My lot is worth more than my dwelling,” she said. “I’m not a distressed seller. Who knows what is going to happen?”

It was tough for Smith to say goodbye to her family’s cottage. “It was almost 100-years-old and in about three hours (after demolition began) it was already getting loaded into a dumpster,” Smith said.

Smith still believes in Fort Myers Beach. She owns another cottage on the island, one of the few to survive Hurricane Ian. “It weathered it better,” Smith said. Despite damage to the exterior, the pool and fence, Smith said she was “pretty much able to put it back together.”