The Country Club Luxury Of Beautiful Aventura, Florida. Waterfront Living At Its Best!

These days Aventura is an incorporated city pretty much sandwiched between U.S. 1 and the Intracoastal Waterway and south of the Broward County line. The first time I ran into the name Aventura was in the early 1970's when it was the name of a new country club and I was doing the photography for a public relations agency that was representing them.

The golf club was renamed Turnberry Isle, and Aventura was applied to the area as a whole. Condos were built and a very successful large regional mall was constructed there. What nobody seems to remember is the place that was there half a century and more earlier. Even the Florida East Coast Railroad had a station there.

There were a number of roads running east from U.S. 1 through the mangroves towards the Intracoastal Waterway. For the most part they were cinder roads made from crushed and graded cinders, the mineral left over after coal was burned. Plentiful and cheap. There were a number of tourist traps like this museum, along with small motels and restaurants along the highway but back aways were rental apartments, rooming houses and tiny houses. These have long been gone in favor of apartments and commercial development.

Walking North From Jewfish Creek

Jewfish Creek seperates Key Largo from the southern tip of the Florida "mainland", although back about 1970, when this photo was taken, "mainland" included about a thirty mile stretch south of Florida City where the high and dry was only this narrow piece of filled land containing U.S. 1, and on both sides was mangrove swamp. Those trees in the background are black mangroves and they grow in shallow salt or brackish water, not on real land.

A few miles north of Jewfish Creek there was this bend in the road. In this shot we're looking more or less south, I'm walking north. I've been trying to remember who shot this, but I'm betting on Jon Sinish because because my wife Stephanie would have had to get on her knees to get that low angle point of view while Jon could probably manage it by standing on tip-toe.

I still have that belt buckle! I should probably get another belt blank and start wearing it again. It'll go nicely with my hair now that I'm letting it grow back after all those years.

I'm not sure what camera/lens I have in my hand, nor what camera/lens was used to take the photo. For some stupid reason I remember that the jeans were brown and that the shirt was light beige with fine brown stripes.