The Man Who Sold Cool

A paradise you could feel on your skin

In 1924 Florida was in the middle of the loudest real-estate boom the country had ever seen. Trains ran south packed with people who'd never owned anything and were about to own a piece of the sun. But here's what's easy to forget from an air-conditioned living room: they were pouring into a state that, for half the year, was hard to stand.

There was no air conditioning. Not in the houses, not in the offices, not anywhere an ordinary person lived, worked, or slept. So Florida sold the only cooling it had — the weather itself. Shade. Water. A porch where the evening air finally moved.

Davis understood that better than any developer of his day. He didn't just buy a corner of Tampa and subdivide it. He built an island — wrapped on every side by cool bay water — and stocked it with the whole nineteenth-century idea of comfort: a yacht basin, canals to bring the breeze inland, tennis courts, a golf course, and a grand open-air "Roman Pool" he sold, in his own advertising copy, as "an admirable touch of Mediterranean grandeur… to furnish an advanced degree of comfort."

Comfort. That was the word he kept reaching for. He was selling the feeling of cool before anyone in Tampa could manufacture it.

How you sell land that isn't there yet

Davis had done this before, on a smaller scale, and had made and lost money doing it. Back in Tampa in 1924, he heard what Carl Fisher was pulling off down in Miami — dredging islands out of Biscayne Bay and selling them — and he decided he could do it bigger.

He bought the rights to the submerged land from the city for $350,000. Then he set dredges chugging out in Hillsborough Bay, sucking sand and muck up off the bottom through long pipes and spraying it into the shape of his islands. The ground rose out of the water while buyers watched. That was the whole magic trick, done in daylight: he was manufacturing Florida in real time, and letting the crowd see it happen.

You can't dredge a boom forever

For about eighteen months, David Paul Davis was one of the richest and most famous men in Florida — a poor kid from Green Cove Springs whose family had come to Tampa after the killing freeze of the 1890s, now selling the rest of the country its escape from the cold.

Then, by early 1926, the music stopped. The boom that had made Davis had been running on people buying to sell to the next person buying to sell — and one winter, the next person didn't show up. Banks tightened. Lots that had traded three times in a week suddenly wouldn't move once.

Davis was overextended, with a second dredged-island project going up at St. Augustine. To stay ahead of what he owed, in August 1926 he sold off most of his stake in the Tampa islands — the thing that had made his name — and gambled everything on finishing the new one. He had built an entire city on the promise of natural cooling, at the exact moment the money that floated it went under.

One night in the middle of the Atlantic

In October 1926, Davis boarded the White Star liner Majestic — then the largest ship in the world — bound for Europe. His ten-year-old son George was asleep in the next cabin. A young woman named Lucille Zehring, a former Mack Sennett bathing-beauty, was traveling with him.

Three days later, just across the water

Here's the part that stops you cold.

Three days after Davis disappeared into the Atlantic — on October 15, 1926 — a new building opened its doors just across the water in downtown Tampa. The Tampa Theatre. The same dreamed-up Mediterranean architecture Davis had been selling on his islands. And it had something no building in the city had ever had before: air conditioning.

The islands he made outlived the man

The strange thing is that the islands were never the failure. Davis was. The land he pumped out of the bay was real, and it stayed. Over the next decades Davis Islands filled in and became one of the most sought-after neighborhoods in Tampa — Tampa General Hospital on the north tip, a small airport on the south, streets of the same tile-roofed Mediterranean houses and apartments he'd started.

Davis sold cool before anyone could make it. He sold the breeze, the water, the shaded veranda — the old idea that comfort was something you found, or moved toward, or bought a lot beside. He built a whole island on that idea, and it left him broke and gone at 41.

What finally made Florida livable — what let thousands of people move onto his islands and actually stay through August — arrived three days after he drowned, humming quietly under a movie palace downtown. Every cooled house on Davis Islands today runs on that machine, not the breeze.

Davis had the right dream. He just sold it about a decade too early to be true.