Postcards from the South: Sarasota Terrace Hotel – Sarasota, Florida

I grew up in Florida, so I can say with complete authority that it’s a miserable state: ugly, plagued with deadly heat and reptiles, and teeming with the most hostile, willfully ignorant people in the United States—though they’ve got a lot of competition these days.

In recent years, I’ve occasionally dipped back into Florida to photograph buildings, but only in the winter, when snakes and alligators are in hibernation. Unfortunately, the people never disappear.

I visited Sarasota twice, primarily to see its surviving Modernist structures from the Sarasota School of Architecture, but I never got around to photographing the old Sarasota Terrace Hotel, completed in 1926¹ and designed by Pringle & Smith² of Atlanta.

Location of Sarasota Terrace Hotel

In truth, the building just doesn’t interest me that much. It’s a standard Beaux-Arts affair: handsome and solidly executed, but not unlike a thousand others of the same style.

The 10-story hotel cost $750,000³ to build and was developed by Charles Ringling⁴ of the Ringling Brothers. Yep, the circus people.

When the Sarasota Terrace closed in 1972, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune noted that “it never achieved the prominance [sic] of some of the other area hotels.”⁵ Sarasota County purchased the property the same year, and the building was renovated to serve as the county’s administration center.⁶

Pringle & Smith designed another building in Sarasota at the same time as the hotel: the nearby American National Bank,^{7 8} also 10 stories, and also underwhelming.

Atlanta architects have rarely done their best work in Florida.

References

1. “Robinson First Guest At Sarasota Terrace”. Sarasota Herald (Sarasota, Florida), May 15, 1926, p. 1. ↩︎
2. Craig, Robert M. The Architecture of Francis Palmer Smith, Atlanta’s Scholar-Architect. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press (2012), p. 120-22. ↩︎
3. “Building Activities Here”. Sarasota Herald (Sarasota, Florida), June 29, 1926, p. 2. ↩︎
4. “Ringlings To Arrive Saturday”. Sarasota Herald (Sarasota, Florida), January 29, 1926, Section Four, p. 1. ↩︎
5. Cullinane, Jim. “Hotel Rooms, Corridors Now Quiet”. Sarasota Herald-Tribune (Sarasota, Florida), December 11, 1972, p. 2B. ↩︎
6. The Sarasota Terrace Hotel | Sarasota History Alive! ↩︎
7. “Permit Issued For Bank Home”. Sarasota Herald (Sarasota, Florida), October 21, 1925, p. 16. ↩︎
8. “American National Is Towering Structure Of Prominence In City”. Sarasota Herald (Sarasota, Florida), December 15, 1926, p. 12. ↩︎