Coral in the Walls, a Dance Floor on the Roof: The Davis Center Is Fort Myers' Coolest Room in the Hottest Month

Here is a building that was literally quarried from the sea. When architect Nat Gaillard Walker went up in 1933 on First Street in downtown Fort Myers, he faced his Neoclassical Revival federal building in limestone hauled from the Florida Keys — the kind of stone whose walls are, per the Center's own account, "embedded with coral formations and sea shells." Look closely at the exterior of the Sidney & Berne Davis Art Center (2301 First St, in the River District) and you are looking at fossilized reef. There is not another marquee arts room in Southwest Florida with the Gulf built into its skin.

That deserves saying out loud, because in the dog days of a SW Florida summer the instinct is to write the whole live-music calendar off as air-conditioned nothing. The Davis Center refuses the memo. Its rooftop sculpture garden — "Sidney's Rooftop" — turns into a dance floor after dark, and on Jul 31 it hosts a Retro Rooftop Dance Party under the downtown sky. A DJ, a parapet, and the limestone columns catching the last of the heat: that is a better argument for staying in town in July than any I can construct.

The context is what makes it sing. The received wisdom is that nothing lives here between Memorial Day and Labor Day, that the snowbirds take the culture south with them. But look at what the region's arts-center rooms are actually booking. Up the road at the Center for Performing Arts in Bonita Springs, the summer recital series has been startlingly game: blues heavyweight Selwyn Birchwood came through Jul 11, the Americana bill of Kelly Hunt and Sara Morgan lands Aug 8, and Jim Lauderdale — a genuine Nashville lifer — plays Aug 14. That is not a room coasting to September. That is a room programming like it means it.

Which reframes what the Davis Center is doing downtown. These arts-center rooms — the coral-walled one in Fort Myers, the recital hall in Bonita Springs — are quietly carrying the slow season on their backs while everyone assumes the lights are off. They are small enough to fill on a Thursday and serious enough to book acts worth driving for. The economics of summer in SWFL punish the giant rooms; they reward the intimate, mission-driven ones. A former federal building with a rooftop and a nonprofit's stubbornness turns out to be exactly the right size for August.

There is also just the pleasure of the thing. Most cities keep their handsome 1933 civic architecture roped off behind velvet and plaques. Fort Myers put a bar and a dance party on top of its. The columns that once flanked a post office now frame a sightline over the River District; the coral in the walls that predates the building, predates the city, predates all of us, holds up a room where somebody is going to play a retro set on the last night of July and nobody is going to think twice about the geological miracle underfoot.

So here is the summer play. Skip the tribute-band cattle call for one weekend. Climb to Sidney's Rooftop on Jul 31, look at the limestone that used to be a reef, and let the Davis Center make its quiet case: the slow season only looks slow if you are staring at the wrong rooms. Fort Myers built one of its best out of the sea floor. Go dance on top of it.

Sources: SBDAC FAQ; Centers for the Arts of Bonita Springs