The circus may have left town (sort of), but the culture just keeps coming--and then there are those beaches . . .
By Alan Solomon
Tribune staff reporter

SARASOTA, Fla. -- Sarasota has always been a little bit different. That's what happens when for 30-plus years, you mix grand old money with elephants, aerialists, clowns-and, of course, sand, early-bird specials, palm trees, spring training and elderly drivers who, especially in high season, make right turns from left lanes just to get our attention.  Even when the circus leaves town, which it did in 1959, it takes a while to settle back into being your everyday Clearwater.

Which it appears Sarasota never will.  Folks, this is Florida. No doubt about it. That's why Jungle Gardens is still in business up Tamiami Trail after 60 years. But come to Sarasota-as thousands have been doing for almost a century, since Mrs. Potter Palmer of the original Chicago Hotel Potter Palmers bought up a third of Sarasota County as a gift to herself-and you'll know pretty quickly that this is no ordinary patch of drained swampland.

The following is a true story:

On a warm, crystal clear Saturday afternoon in November when any sane person in Florida would've been on either a beach, golf course, boat or their fifth vodka and tonic, Sarasotans were flocking to (hold on to your 2-for-1 key lime pie coupon now) the Sarasota Reading Festival.  In one of the day's programs, David McCullogh, author of the much-praised and much-purchased "John Adams" biography, was to speak in the city's 1,100-seat Sarasota Opera House.

Three points:

First, there is a Sarasota Opera House, the nationally historically registered playground of (point No. 2) the home-grown Sarasota Opera.

And third: They had to turn people away from McCullogh's speech. Turn people away. Again, the opera house holds 1,100 people. And this wasn't the day's only program.

"Who would've thought," event co-chair Caren Lobo said in the next day's Sarasota Herald-Tribune, "you'd need five police officers to handle crowd control for a book on John Adams?"  There's more.  At the very moment that was happening, the 11th Annual Sarasota Blues Fest-Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, Delbert McClinton and others-was going strong at the Sarasota County Fairgrounds.  And if all that wasn't enough, the evening offered local productions of musicals "Cabaret," "The Fantasticks" and "Always . . . Patsy Cline"; and the resident Asolo Theatre Company was performing a very funny French farce (in English) called "A Flea in Her Ear" and probably selling out.  None of which, thank goodness, conflicted with the Sarasota Ballet's debut of "Don Quixote," scheduled for the following week.  "We have an awful lot of arts," said a woman handing out leaflets for one of them at a festival booth. "It's like a little Stratford."   Actually, it's bigger than either the English or Canadian Stratford and lots bigger than Stratford, Texas. Sarasota population: 51,650. Add another 4,000 for Longboat Key across the bridge. But still . . .  "There is no community in the country this size that has the opera, the ballet, the symphony [forgot to mention-the symphony was playing that night], the chorale [they were off], the art school and nine theater groups," said Carole Kleinberg, late of Morton Grove, who splits time between teaching and being education director of the Asolo. "And there are a lot of writers' workshops."

Now, before anyone get the idea that Sarasota is just the University of Chicago with coconuts: This really is Florida, with all the traditional trappings.  There are three major beaches in greater Sarasota, which for the purposes of this story we'll call everything from the northern border with Bradenton to the end of Siesta Key to the south.  The beach on Siesta Key is probably the best for most of us. All Gulf of Mexico beaches hereabouts are legally public; the ones on Siesta and Lido Keys not only admit it, but have large parking lots to hammer the point home.  Siesta, overseen by Sarasota County, is broad, long (8 miles) and clean. The sand is so fine that it crunches like snow when you walk on it; its composition (something to do with quartz) keeps it cool to the feet even on hot days. It's big enough to accommodate hordes of partying young folk toward the north end and leave plenty of room for us to enjoy whatever it is we enjoy about beaches. The existence of zillions of condos south of the volleyball nets doesn't spoil anything, which in itself is amazing. There are just a couple of little motels on either end.

Lido Beach, 2 miles long, is the only city-run beach. Just about the same quality of sand. Just about the same quality of everything, plus a few more hotel rooms (including the especially pleasant Helmsley Sandcastle). The north end, away from the main parking lot and therefore more isolated, reportedly is favored by those persons who especially favor isolation, if you catch my drift. I was too modest to personally confirm or deny, and unfortunately left the good binocs at home.

Then there's Longboat Key-and before we get too deep into these waters, understand that if I could afford to buy a second home there (average condo: $539,000; average house: $683,000; cost of boat dockominium: $200,000, not counting the boat), I would, in a heartbeat. OK.  Longboat is a 10-mile-long sliver split by Gulf of Mexico Drive, with condos, two traditional-style hotels (a Holiday Inn and a Hilton, both understated and shockingly ordinary), a few smallish malls and some sprawling mixed-use resorts. The relatively unwide beach, as clean as it is long, is treated by Longboatp eople as their private domain, even though legally the riffraff are entitled to their share.  And they can take it-if they're willing to play "Find a Beach Access Point," which, on Longboat Key, is a little like playing "Find a Great Potato Knish" in Myanmar. There aren't many. The signs are small, about the same size as the ones that warn bicyclists there's a $25 fine for failure to jingle at pedestrians.  "That's on purpose," Kristin Heintz of the Longboat Key Chamber of Commerce, said of the un-heartfelt welcome. "It's to keep the traffic down. There's about eight parking spaces. That's about it."

Obviously, the illusion of enforced exclusivity has been good for the real-estate business. Happily for us, along with the two chain hotels and spiff-heavy resorts, there also are 60 or so mom-and-pop properties on the island, most of them cottage clusters or cottage-kitchenette combinations at rates that don't force us to pawn our Timexes.  "People think of Longboat Key as kind of a snooty place-and there's some of that," said Jim Hayworth, who left Batavia 41/2 years ago with wife Cindy to buy the six-unit, 50-year-old, very inviting Starfish Motel right on the beach. "But we're just working shlubs from the Midwest, and this is a piece of disappearing Old Florida."  Along with beaches are the other familiar realities found along Florida's Gulf Coast: Excellent fishing, good and better-than-good local restaurants scattered among the Outbacks and Red Lobsters, plenty of golf courses, lovebugs that (when it's their time) splatter into windshields, baseball players (the Cincinnati Reds spring-train here on the former White Sox campground), nearly tame pelicans and herons (Longboat is said to be home to wild peacocks, but I didn't see or splatter a one) and gluts of traffic, especially behind raised bridges and anyone looking for an address.

And there's the whole Gulf Coast thing.  "The Gulf Coast, it's mostly Midwesterners and Canadians," said Heidi Becker, a New Jersey yoga instructor who has been sunning on Lido Beach with family for 30 years. "They're more laid-back than the East Coast.  "It's certainly not as snooty as the East Coast," she said. "Sure, the O.P.s [Floridaspeak for "old people"] on the Gulf Coast are nosy, but on the East Coast they're meddlesome."  A shopkeeper even broke down the Canadians: "The Montreal people go to the East Coast. Toronto people come here."  But what really separates Sarasota from even the rest of the laid-back, generally unsnooty Gulf Coast are the Ringling legacy and the seemingly ever-present commitment to the arts.

When John Ringling switched the family business's winter quarters from Connecticut to Sarasota in 1927, he brought more than tons of raw fertilizer and people in tights: He brought money, much of it his and Mable's, his wife. Before his death in 1936, he had built an art museum (called, cleverly, the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art) and stuffed it with Baroque and other paintings and knicknacks, some of them good.  Rubens is represented here, along with a few other familiar names (Velazquez, Gainsborough); in the museum's courtyard stand replicas of famed statues, including a full-size casting of Michelangelo's "David" that, in inoffensively positioned silhouette, has become a Sarasota symbol.

The Sailors Circus, an annual celebration of flying through the air with the greatest of ease and other death-defying feats to thrill and chill children of all ages, has been presented by the young people of Sarasota for half a century. A professional troupe called Circus Sarasota began operations in 1997; and the Ringling Museum of the Circus, steps from the art museum, helps keep the tradition alive as well.

But it's the art museum that put Art and Sarasota in the same breath. The traditional high-society patronage launched here by Bertha Palmer's 1910 arrival (her gardens and estate survive as Spanish Point) carried over into the Ringling era and on into the present.

Opera, ballet and symphony orchestras don't bubble up without people with the vision and wherewithal to make them happen. The Asolo's roots, to name one cultural icon, date to an 18th Century theater imported, brick-by-brick, by the Ringling estate in 1950; a Florida State University company began regular performances there 10 years later (moving in 1990 to another imported theater, this one from Scotland)-and by then another Sarasota passion beyond fried oysters had begun to develop.  Florida's more affluent towns are no strangers to art galleries, many featuring works by local artists along with the predictable seascapes and florals found wherever salt water meets interior decorators. Downtown Sarasota, the malls and some shops on St. Armands Circle, an upscale shopping and restaurant enclave on St. Armands Key (between Lido Key and Longboat), had the standard mix-and then came Towles Court.

Six years ago, this derelict collection of rotting Old Florida houses near downtown was headed for condemnation; plans were to raze the houses, built mostly in the 1920s, for county offices.  Instead, a local developer, artists, the city and the county-in a stunning example of public-private cooperation-turned the district into an artists' colony. Artists bought the homes for as low as $50,000, sank money into them and converted them (for the most part) into combination living quarters-studios-showrooms. The first gallery was opened in October 1995 by Kathleen Carrillo, a Californian.  "I knew Carmel really well," she said. "Santa Fe, with Canyon Road-blighted areas that bounced back, and artists did it."  Artists have done it here. Today in this former slum pocket, 35 to 40 artists are showing work in 25 galleries, some of that work created onsite.  "We're building up reputations as fine galleries," said Carrillo, between strokes on her latest vividly colored landscape. "This is fine art, not crafty stuff. Our destination shoppers are starting to show up."  So this is Sarasota: theater and concerts, ballet and fine art, bread and circuses. And Florida thrown in. Can't forget Florida.

"I love the beach," said Asolo's Kleinberg, who had been coming to Sarasota "forever" before finally moving here two years ago. "I take a coffee down to the beach, read my paper, take a walk-and then I can face anything.  "And we have to watch the sunset. We plan our days around the sunset."  Which, despite all the efforts of all the Ringlings and Barnums and Baileys, remains the greatest show on Earth.