Lake Elbert, Winter Haven: The Hillside That Was Meant to Be America's Largest Modernist Neighborhood

More than 70 percent of each house's walls were floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors and glass panel inserts. Rather than clear the grove to build, Leedy worked the native citrus into the lots and into the courtyards, and the mature grapefruit trees cast shadows over the decks of the glass houses. As of 2019, four of the ten still had no central air conditioning.

Craney treated the ten as a first installment. He bought 70 more lots around Winter Haven and advertised that more houses of the same design were coming. The architectural historian Sam Lubell has described the Craney Spec Houses as having been "poised to become the largest collection of Modernist homes in the country." Within a year of finishing the first ten, Craney abandoned that plan. After the 1958 recession he sold the 70 lots and moved on to developments in Bartow, and Robert McElroy, the Winter Haven realtor and businessman who picked up some of the land, went bankrupt. The development stopped at ten houses.

Winter Haven's political and civic leaders had seen the turnout on Drexel Avenue when the homes were first offered for sale. They commissioned Leedy for some of the city's most important structures between 1958 and 1980, and his work in civic Winter Haven includes City Hall, the Chamber of Commerce, the Country Club and the Garden Center.

The house at 1518 Drexel Avenue NE, at the southwest corner of the block, was the first of the ten built. Leedy moved in when the houses opened in 1957 and lived there until his death in November 2018. Marjorie Ingram, whom he married in 1958, agreed to live in a glass house on one condition, as her daughter Helen Patterson recalled it: the street-facing T-111 plywood fence had to come out and a concrete block wall go up in its place. Every owner on the block eventually wanted the same eight-foot compound wall, particularly once new houses went up around the district and replaced the grapefruit trees that had been the privacy. One resident in a Mark II, a centenarian named Mary Frances Whittinghill, has called hers her happy house.

Hurricane Irma took down or weakened the mature trees around 1518 Drexel in 2017, and they were removed, but the house was preserved. After Leedy died, the architect Max Strang — who grew up in a Leedy house and later worked in Leedy's office — acquired the residence and the nearby studio, buildings that had served their owner for 58 and 62 years, and restored them. Eight of the ten houses count as contributing buildings in the district the National Register added in 2019; the other two had been altered too far to qualify.