Lehigh Acres,
then and now
Postcards, papers and photographs of Lehigh Acres from public archives, woven together by decade. Neighbors fill in the gaps.
The story
from WikipediaRead it all ↗Lehigh Acres was developed in the mid-1950s by Chicago businessman Lee Ratner. Seeking a tax shelter, Ratner had sold his pest control business and faced the possibility of losing most of his earnings to the high capital gains tax of that era. Ratner heard that cattle was a good investment for people in his predicament, and he bought 18,000 acres (73 km2) of land in eastern Lee County and named it the Lucky Lee Ranch. After ranching for a while, and despite having no prior development experience, Ratner joined with Gerald H. Gould, a Florida advertising executive, Manuel Riskin, a Chicago CPA, and Edward Shapiro, a former Chicagoan who was in the real estate business in California, and began land sales at Lehigh Acres.
Text from Wikipedia, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
Timeline
built from the dates on the items belowFinish Lehigh Acres’s story
Most archives stop around 1920. The photos from after that are in family albums, not libraries.
0 of 10 decades since 1900 have photos 🔁Retake an old viewMajestic 19942 Lake Vista Circle …, 1899: stand where they stood+15 📦Share a family photoSign in to add one+10Lehigh Acres, decade by decade
1990s
Then & now
No then-and-now pairs yet. Take a photo from the same spot as Majestic 19942 Lake Vista Circle 001 (1899) and it appears here side by side.
🔁 Retake this view · +15Stories next door
nearby towns’ historyFrom Wikimedia Commons (6). Images are copied here with their credits and licenses, shown on each photo’s page. Refreshed monthly.