Life on Pineapple Row
Every house has a story and none so rich on the Treasure Coast as the Hill House on North
Second Street, at the bottom of Tickle Tummy Hill in Fort Pierce. While commonly called the
Hill House, it might be more accurate to call them Hill Houses, for they are a collection of
three small ramshackle buildings rather than one complete whole.
Long neglected and barely standing, they saw their heyday at the turn of the 20th century, when
the studio at the south side of the property was briefly headquarters for
The American Bee Keeper magazine and for decades was home to the
Florida Photographic Concern, the photo business run by Harry Hill and
later his son, Lowell.
If you’ve ever seen an old photograph of the Treasure Coast from the
1900s to the 1930s, chances are it was taken by Harry Hill. Beginning on
Page 10 of this issue, historian Sandra Thurlow helps us give Harry
long-overdue recognition for the photographic legacy he bestowed on
the Treasure Coast.
Years after the deaths of Harry and Lowell, I briefly lived in one of the
buildings in the 1980s while working as a reporter for the old Fort Pierce
News-Tribune. My landlord was the avuncular Arthur C. Pottorff Jr., an
electrician turned musician who went by the nickname “Potty,’’ a
moniker he embraced as much as he embodied.
I lived at the back of the property, in a small one-room bunker that Hill
had used to store his glass negatives. Behind the studio on the south side
was another small one-room building where fellow News-Tribune
reporter Peter Williams lived. It was there that Peter started a small garden
and penned the start to a never-published novel. I still remember the
opening line: “He was the third day into cultivating his garden when he
realized he didn’t like vegetables.” Potty and his wife, Vera, lived on the first floor on the north
building facing Second Street. Angie Yanaros lived in the apartment above them. The most sensuous
eucalyptus tree you ever saw hovered over the back of the house, as if embracing it.
My contribution to the place came one day when a demolition crew razed the old St. Anastasia on
Orange Avenue, the church of my childhood. I’d noticed that the cross at the top of the church
(formed of galvanized aluminum) was in the refuse pile, apparently headed for the dump. I enlisted
Potty to help me, and together we snipped the cross from the rest of the roofing material.
Back home, we stuck the cross in the ground near Pete’s garden, up against the house. The cross
stood there for years, with many people duped into thinking it marked a grave and wondering how
somebody could live so close to a burial spot.
It was offbeat gestures like these and an inclination to not make too many improvements that
made Potty a good steward of the place. With few changes, he turned Hill’s photography studio
into a music studio, where he supplemented his income from gigs and landlordship with lessons in
piano and trumpet.
Potty was about as generous a landlord as you could ask for. He’d happily invite you into his
place to join him for a drink at any time of day or night. But instead of asking you if you wanted a
drink, he’d say, “Want a change in attitude?’’ or “How about taking the edge off?’’ He possessed a
large collection of off-color jokes, which he dispatched with great regularity. He seemed always to
be in a state of laughter, his laugh being a whole-body experience, erupting from his ample belly
and then convulsing every limb.
Potty had grown up in Fort Pierce – his greatest claim being that he was one of the youngest boys
to ever make Eagle Scout – and lived in a variety of places between Jacksonville and Miami before
returning to his hometown. I think he settled on buying the Hill place mostly because it was across
the street from his best friend, the landscape artist A.E. “Bean” Backus.
During our halcyon days there, we somehow began a comparison to Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row” and
instead called our neighborhood “Pineapple Row,’’ a tribute to the fruit that covered much of downtown
Fort Pierce in the early 1900s. Peter and I even threw a “Pineapple Row” party at Backus’ house,
with Backus in the role as the wise and kindly Doc and Potty as Mac, the leader of “I and the boys.”
The party seemed like one of our last group efforts before I moved on to the west coast of Florida
to take a job at another newspaper. A few months later, our little community fell apart. A strange
medical condition claimed Vera’s life, an auto crash took Potty’s and heart failure claimed the great
Backus, all within the course of a year.
I never had the emotional strength to go back to the old Hill houses and only this year visited the
renovated Backus house, now home to Main Street Fort Pierce. Our good times on Pineapple Row
are memorialized in a wooden sculpture my artist brother, Michael Enns, constructed of the Hill
place, complete with a trumpeter at a piano, a cross and the eucalyptus tree.
There is something haunting about it, a reminder that life is as precarious as those little buildings
barely standing at the bottom of Tickle Tummy Hill.
Reach Publisher and Editor Gregory Enns at
772.466.3346 or enns@indianrivermag.com.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
A TREASURE TO READ
4
Publisher & Editor
Gregory Enns
Associate Publisher
Allen Osteen
Contributing Writers
Janie Gould,
Gloria Taylor Weinberg,
Susan Burgess, Willi Miller,
Sue-Ellen Sanders,
Greg Gardner, Jerry Shaw,
Catherine Enns Grigas,
Sandra Thurlow
Photography
Rob Downey, Ed Drondoski,
Greg Gardner, Bob Dobens,
Robert P. Dudley
Design
Michelle L. Burney
Editing
Jay Goley, Julie Blomquist,
Judith Collins
Web Editor
Michael Burney
Cover
Vero Beach pediatrician
Susie O'Toole
by Ed Drondoski
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Artist Michael Enns created
this sculpture of the
Hill studio shortly after
the death of Arthur C.
“Potty” Pottorff in 1988.
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