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.
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.
It’s no Trader Vic’s, but Florida’s oldest Tiki bar is as authentic as it gets. The Bahi Hut opened in 1962,1 2 3 next to the Golden Host Motor Hotel—the torches are still burning at both places.
The bar claims it began operation in 1954, but don’t ask me where they got that date from—even the adjoining motel didn’t open until 1959.4 5 Pass me a Mai Tai, and I’ll happily overlook the discrepancy.
Sarasota is a hot spot for mid-20th-century Modernist architecture, with several surviving works by Paul Rudolph and other designers of the so-called Sarasota School of Architecture.
It’s fitting that a city trading on its retro reputation still has this little slice of exotica, evoking fond memories of some moonlit night being serenaded by Les Baxter. That actually happened to me in Kansas once (thanks, KPR!).
The sign shown above apparently debuted with the bar’s opening and was restored circa 2018.6 A hui hou.
