As Hurricane Ian carried the Caloosahatchee River into downtown Fort Myers, turning hallways into waterways, Bobby Nokley and his family found shelter at the Luminary Hotel.
“The water was inches – and that's not an exaggeration – inches from coming in the front door,” Nokley recalled to NBC2.
Nokley, the general manager for the hotel, really isn’t exaggerating. Footage captured during Ian’s fury shows storm surge rising just shy of the first floor.
“This building fared incredibly well,” Nokley said. “It was put to the test.”
The Luminary lost some signage, including its big U, but the doors and windows held strong. And while some water snuck through sliders on upper floors, it stayed out of the main level.
“There's a certain amount of pride, a certain sense of satisfaction,” Jonathan Rae told NBC2. “We've done our job well.”
Rae is an architect with HOK, the firm that designed the Luminary. While they never imagined it’d face such a storm just two years after opening, it was designed with its riverside location – and hurricanes – at the forefront.
The hotel is on what’s called a plinth, which rises above other surrounding buildings.
And the sleek and simple look is by design. The slight bend in the center makes it more rigid.
“We purposely avoided alcoves, recesses, those types of things,” Rae said. “The resiliency is so that the building can not only perform in the hurricane but recover from it afterward.”
It did both.
The design team raised the emergency generator with the hotel, so the Luminary was able to reopen just days after the storm.
“That mattered. Because the guests that came into this hotel were first responders,” Nokley recalled. “We did OK. Our neighbors did not do OK.”
Withstanding the storm would allow the Luminary to serve a bigger purpose. In the days after the hurricane, they hosted state emergency crews and helped those who lost everything.
It’s a story they now tell through that fallen U from their sign, which sits in the middle of the lobby. It’s a reminder that, when it comes to resilience, it isn’t just about a building.
It’s about the people.
“Yeah, we had a bump in the road, this was unprecedented, whether you’ve lived in Florida your whole life or a few years. But it represents the absolute resiliency and path forward to restoring life and livelihood to the district here,” Nokley said.