Sarasota Livin'

At the Labor Day weekend reunion of the RHS Class of '65, the consensus of my classmates who had remained in Sarasota or had at some point returned was pretty much the consensus of the respondents to this poll - that the town is not what it used to be. I had no basis for an opinion of the subject at that point. I had come straight to the Friday night event at the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge on Beneva via I-75 and Fruitville Road, so that was the extent of my exposure to Sarasota 2005. Fruitville had been a two-lane country road, so that certainly looked different - but not necessarily worse.

On an earlier pass-through of downtown half a dozen years earlier, I recalled thinking that Sarasota's downtown was looking much better. The old Maas Bros. had become a cineplex, the diagonal parking in the blocks near Five Points seemed to be doing a nice job of calming traffic, and sidewalk cafes were everywhere, doing a nice business. I thought that Sarasota was lucky to have a Main Street that did not double as a major highway. In Tallahassee, where I've lived since leaving Sarasota, our four-lane main drag is also U.S. 27. It took months of wrangling with the Florida Department of Transportation to get diagonal parking on just the west side of Monroe Street, and ultimately it didn't help all that much. With the exception of a new high-rise condo under construction, Monroe Street is still pretty much a sterile phalanx of lawyers' and state-association offices interrupted by the occasional restaurant. The interesting urban redevelopment is occurring elsewhere - on Adams Street a block west, in the Gaines Street/Railroad Avenue area and All Saints neighborhood between FSU and FAMU, and on Monroe Street and Thomasville Road just north of downtown.

I had planned to explore my old haunts by bike over the next couple of days and was prepared for the worst based on the reunion chitchat. I ended up being pleasantly surprised. Sarasota's network of urban bike lanes is among the best in the Southeast. I biked anywhere I pleased,from my hotel on Boulevard of the Arts to eateries on Main Street (where many of the patrons also had arrived by bike), to the Lido and Siesta Key Pavilions and to Longboat Key, without ever feeling I was taking my life in my hands. On a holiday weekend in a Florida city, believe me, providing this level of comfort and mobility for a wandering cyclist is quite an achievement. I noted a fair amount development and infill on my travels, but none of the streetscapes and beach roadways I remembered fondly from my youth seemed irrevocably harmed by it. And that downtown - wow! For a community of Sarasota's size, the number and variety of shops - from galleries to paint-and-hardware stores - is really to die for.

All of the downtown residential development did seem relentlessly upscale. But that's also true in Tallahassee, where anything beyond a cramped efficiency starts at a quarter million and all the pricey new high-rise housing stock is being snapped up by the only people who can afford it - lobbyists, politicos, well-heeled alums and the wealthier parents of FSU and FAMU students.

So to this time traveler anyway, Sarasota, especially the downtown area, seems better than ever four decades later. The bad news for my classmates who have remained is, I liked it so much I may move back, adding to the growth that makes them so restive. But at least I'm a cyclist. I won't require much in the way of public parking.