contract, Nolen wrote an associate, "This seems to be an opportunity to do rather more than we have ever been given the chance to do before." In March 1923, Nolen completed an ambitious plan to imbue this resort city of 15,000 with a "form and flavor unlike that of other places." A greenbelt of preserves and parks encircled the lower third (45 square miles) of the Pinellas Peninsula, setting the city's "natural boundaries" and creating a lure for tourists. He also presented plans to improve traffic connections and establish a Civic Center. Mixed-use neighborhood centers were clustered to prevent the unsightly spread of commercial uses and traffic problems along city thoroughfares. A system of parkways united the city, providing pedestrian access to parks and local neighborhood centers with store groups, churches, and public buildings. Nolen's plan rested on the "adequate control of private development." He proposed a series of land use controls to ensure that development followed the efficient outlay of public facilities, rather than outline speculative desires. Without these regulations, Nolen was hardly sanguine about the city's future. "It has been said and with reason," he wrote, "that man is the only animal who desecrates the surroundings of his own habitation." In the midst of the great Florida land boom, the desire to make quick profits outweighed any lofty notion of city building. Moreover, the idea of investing public funds to improve the squalid conditions in "the colored section" found little sentiment in a place, where one anti-planning editor advocated replacing black laborers (17 percent of the population) with immigrants from the "agricultural sections of England." In a referendum, Nolen's planning initiative received only 13 percent of the vote. The St. Petersburg experience disheartened Nolen, but he remained optimistic. His firm worked on 54 projects in Florida, including city plans for Clearwater, Sarasota, and West Palm Beach, new town plans for Clewiston and Bellaire, and neighborhood plans for University Park (Gainesville) and San Jose Estates (Jacksonville). In 1925, Nolen finally found in "Venice an opportunity better ... than any other in Florida to apply the most advanced and most practical ideas of regional planning." Nolen planned Venice for the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers (BLE), a labor union looking to capitalize on the land boom. The BLE, however, was also investing for the long term. BLE officials envisioned a regional center for agriculture and light industry, "a place where the