As Sarasota’s downtown nightlife continues to blossom with new bars and restaurants, city leaders are wary about folks having too much fun on Main Street.
City planning leaders were left scratching their heads Thursday night as they tried to grapple with the challenges and outright inability to prohibit bars with bad management or that might attract clientele that city leaders don’t want.
“We also don’t want to turn Main Street into a quote ‘entertainment district’ where there’s too many bars, where people cruise from bar to bar,” Planning Board Chairman Robert Lindsay said. “There’s a point where we can only do so much social engineering on this, but I think there is a problem when you get too many bars in an area.”
This criticism of downtown as an “entertainment district” is nothing new, but it was reignited earlier this summer when the board and City Commission approved a permit for a Main Street location for the popular St. Pete cocktail joint Cask and Ale, despite fierce objections from some downtown residents who fear downtown is becoming a raucous party scene.
A handful of city leaders agreed and directed the Planning Board to review the various ways full-service bars and restaurants that serve alcohol are reviewed and approved within downtown.
But the board agreed Thursday that it’s difficult to thrust City Hall into deciding which establishments could be viewed as “good bars” and which might cause problems.
At the root of the issue is that some bars are more crowded, noisier and have more fights or police-involved incidents than others, yet they are frequently lumped into the same category from a review standpoint because of the type of liquor license used.
City leaders ain’t beating around that bush, either. They’ll tell you straight up that they’re talking about Smokin’ Joes.¹
It’s loud, rowdy and draws its biggest crowds later in the night — and those folks ain’t the same kind of crowd living in the expensive condo towers looming overhead.
This is the rub, and Lindsay only briefly, but sagely, touched on it Thursday night.
Downtown was designed and zoned years ago to flourish into the vibrant food, art, drink, cultural and boutique heart of Sarasota. It would be a bustling live-work-play paradise on the bay.
The city’s problem now is that it worked. Brilliantly.
Main Street has exploded in ways folks only dreamed, from bars to restaurants to amazing living accommodations. Those who could afford it snatched up downtown condos, those who live elsewhere drive in to work and shop and, on the weekends, we all play together at the same restaurants and bars.
Today, those are the all source of strain: Too much development, parking problems, traffic congestion and this idea that Main Street is losing its quaint charm in favor of an “entertainment district.”
When it gets right down to it, the folks complaining about these things downtown are some of the ones who helped make it such a success.
Ultimately, the Planning Board collectively shrugged and lamented there is no easy fix for this perennial bad bar issue. But the larger question before city leaders is really about the identity of downtown, and that’s not going anyway time soon.