>>Funding for Florida Road Trip was provided through a grant from Florida Humanities with funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

>>On this Florida Road Trip, we're headed to the West Coast, to a city as rich in arts as it is in history.

Join us on the journey as we find the stories and people that make Sarasota the special place that it is.

Buckle up.

Road Trip is back on the road.

♪♪ Thanks for joining us again.

I'm Allison Godlove.

The bright blue water behind me kind of gives it away that I'm here in Sarasota.

It's known for its beautiful beaches and abundance of arts.

But did you know it came close to being called Little Scotland?

>>Sarasota, like a lot of Florida cities, has a history that a lot people don't know.

People, I think, consider the 20th century, particularly after World War Two, as when Sarasota got its start.

But it actually goes back as a place name back to the the 1700s, if not earlier, as Sarazota with a “Z.

” Some say even goes back to the 1500s.

>>Sarasota was pretty much cut off except by water, without the railroad, without roads.

It was basically jungle and bog land, just wet, marshy land, which couldn't sustain much in the way of economic activity.

>>As far as a place that we consider a kind of settled city or settled town.

That history dates back to the 1880s.

Unfortunately, we really don't know where the name comes from.

Again, it did have a a Z in it, Sarazota, as far as we know.

It may have been a Spanish name.

It may have actually been a Native American name.

There have been people in the Sarasota area for 10,000 years.

And so at the time of European contact, it might have been a place name attached to those people.

We do know that the Z was dropped sometime in the 1800s, and the common name Sarasota that we know was adopted.

>>Sarasota really got its start in 1885 when a group of Scott colonists came and they arrived because they thought there was going to be a little Scotland here to greet them and they could easily become gentlemen farmers.

And they were sold this lie or this myth by the Florida mortgage and investment company.

And the streets are named after fruits Orange Avenue, Lemon Avenue, Lime Avenue, coconut to sell them on this idea of this.

So everything you own in Scotland come over to this place called Sarasota.

You can easily become gentlemen farmers.

>>Unfortunately, there was nothing there.

There were a few earlier settlers who lived in the vicinity of what would be Sarasota, but there were no houses for them.

There was a small company store there, which was inadequate.

If it hadn't been for the locals who kind of showed them how to fish and they wouldn't have survived at all.

And the fact is, within a few months they almost all leave.

>>There were some hardy pioneers who did stay, and that company sent the son of the founder, a man named John Hamilton Gillespie, to Sarasota.

And he was the one who really turned things around and created the town of Sarasota.

>>And he brought with him his golf clubs from Scotland.

And before you knew it, he laid out a two acre practice course.

And then in 1905, he laid out a nine acre course.

And he's the gentleman that brought golf to Florida.

I don't think the mortgage company intended to dupe these people.

They themselves have been sold the bill of goods and they bought it and passed it on.

So Gillespie came and he dug up trees, planted the sprigs.

And then in 1887, the hotel he built, the DeSoto Hotel, opened downtown Sarasota right by the Bayfront.

So he's considered the father of Sarasota.

♪♪ >>A lot of people call Sarasota a winter home, and that's been going on for a long time.

One of the earliest winter residents was a woman named Bertha Palmer.

>>Bertha Palmer is a foundational figure in Sarasota history.

And to understand why she's the foundational character, you need to understand her background.

She was a Southerner.

She was born in Louisville in 1849, but her family moved to Chicago about the time of the Civil War.

She was well-educated for a woman of her age and well trained in the social graces.

When she's 13, believe it or not, she meets her future husband.

This is Potter Palmer is his name, who is famous for several things.

One is he started one of the first modern department stores in Chicago, which later became Marshall Field and Company.

He did have the decency to wait till she was 22.

But one of the points is he was a great deal older than she was and died a great deal earlier than she did.

It's winter.

It's February, and she's reading the Chicago Tribune, which has an ad for orange orchard lands in Sarasota, Florida.

>>Within a week, she's down in Florida and buys 140,000 acres of land.

>>But in the process, she transforms everything because in order to make the land usable, she has to drain vast stretches of it.

This is really important to Sarasota's future.

This is where the population came from.

This is where any, you know, a solid agricultural base was given to the community.

>>Bertha also starts a cattle and a hog ranch near the Myakka River, something uncommon for women socialites at the time.

>>She had had a railroad built through her land, the Venice Extension Railroad, which today has now been converted into a very nice walking and bicycle trail all the way from Venice to Sarasota.

But that railroad allowed her to raise the cattle and hogs, and then ship them all over the United States.

The result is that she lays the basis of Sarasota as a powerhouse agricultural county.

>>Sarasota might be small in size, but it's mighty in what this beach town community has to offer in arts and culture.

That relationship began almost as early as the city did.

>>Sarasota and the arts are synonymous with each other.

And again, we think about these things coming in the second half of the 20th century.

But but for Sarasota, they had a tie to the arts going back to the 19-teens to 1920s.

>>I think one of the things that people don't realize about Sarasota is how early art was here.

We know about John Ringling building the Art Museum in the late 1920s and the art school and the circus and everything that that brought to Sarasota.

But over ten years before that, Bertha Palmer is bringing impressionist art to Sarasota.

Monet, Degas, Cassatt and displaying it in her home in Osprey.

And everyone that came to visit her in that home saw that art.

A woman named Ruth Cotton Butler decides that Sarasota needs a symphony, so she gets some other people together.

And the next thing you know, the Florida West Coast Symphony was born, and that's now the Sarasota Orchestra, you know?

So it's just because of this one person kind of galvanizing support around her.

Jean Weidner Goldstein did the same thing in the 1980s with the ballet.

She was a performer, a ballet performer.

She comes to Sarasota and and kind of replicates what Bertha Palmer and John Ringling and the others were doing early on to bring her passion for her art form to Sarasota and then building an organization and a real culture around that.

There's an amazing stuff that's happened here in Sarasota and a huge list of artists, whether that's visual artists, sculptors, performing artists, and they all kind of supported each other and supported this whole culture of arts in Sarasota, which really goes throughout our entire history.

>>You don't have to visit a gallery, a museum or a performance to feel surrounded by art in Sarasota.

>>Some of the most notable art in Sarasota comes as we drive along our streets and we see both ancient sculptures out on St. Armands that John Ringling put out there back in the 1920s.

But then we see these modern murals that depict various aspects of Sarasota, or maybe they're just, you know, topics that people are intrigued with.

But at any rate, now as you travel around Sarasota, you have an opportunity to feel it.

♪♪ >>If you're like me, when you hear the name Ringling, you think of the circus.

But here in Sarasota, it's a large part of the arts culture.

>>It used to be known throughout the world as the Circus City.

You know, John, Ringling brought the circus here in 1927, and it was one of the most popular, if not the most popular tourist attraction in Florida until Disney World opened up.

>>In 1925, John set out to create an art museum.

He hired an architect to begin designing the museum, and he also hired an art advisor to work with him on acquiring works for the collection.

The architect he hired was the architect of the original Metropolitan Museum.

He wanted things big and bold and that as a showman, that's, you know, that's who he was.

And so he really pursued Renaissance and Baroque work, particularly large scale works.

It was a wild move to build a collection and put it in South Florida in the late 1920s.

The conditions weren't really great at a time when they didn't have air conditioning.

It's not good for these European masterpieces to be in this kind of a condition here.

>>The museum opened its doors to the public in 1930, but John Ringling passed away six years later.

In his will, he left the museum to the people of Florida.

The courtyard features several sculptures and a life size statue of David.

Within the walls of the museum are 21 galleries.

>>One of the most important works that we have here are the Rubens paintings.

>>There are only seven left in the world, and five of them can be found at the Ringling Museum of Art.

Ringling's mansion, the Ca dZan is still on the property, along with the historic Oslo Theater, built in 1792 to honor the memory of Catarina, a corner and Empress of Cyprus, who was exiled to the village of Oslo just outside Venice.

The villagers built the theater in her honor and included her portrait, which you can still see today.

After World War Two, the director of the Ringling Museum purchased the theater and moved it to Sarasota.

It continues to be used as a performance space.

>>We've always seen the museum as being kind of the foundation of the arts in Sarasota in many ways.

The orchestra here, which is still performing and is a wonderful organization, began before John Ringling, as did Players Theater.

But a number of the arts and cultural organizations had their beginnings here at the Ringling.

>>For decades, Sarasota has been nicknamed Circus City.

It was the winter home to Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus, but it was also home to the oldest youth circus in America, Sailor Circus.

>>Sailor Circus started 74 years ago, believe it or not, as a P.E.

program at the Sarasota High School gym.

And those days, there were many, many circus families that homesteaded in Sarasota, and the kids used to go to school while the Coach of the P.E.

program saw these kids tumbling and doing somersaults and flick flags and said who taught you how to do all that stuff?

And they said my parents, theyre in the circus.

So they invited some of the parents coaches to come and coach circus arts.

And it was very exciting, very popular, and it grew and grew and grew.

So they grew out of the gym, actually onto the football field, and they started doing performances.

Eventually they even got their own big top, which they used to put up in the spring and do the performances in the big tops.

>>And these students took their talents around the world.

>>They went to Peru, to South America, Peru, not Indiana.

They went to Japan.

So they really got to perform around the world and were made incredible impact for the local community.

So the program itself, about 1% of the students really turned professional.

Most of them go on, we go to go on tour and to go straight to college, you know.

>>25 years ago, Pedro and his wife, Dollie Jacobs, started what is now known as the Circus Arts Conservatory.

>>Our focus is to continue the legacy of Circus in Sarasota and also to raise the perception of the circus, to become recognized as the true art form that it is.

We have many, many outreach programs in the community.

We have our education programs that serves first grade students in Sarasota and Manatee County demonstrating physics because the circus arts can truly, truly explain and demonstrate gravity, for example, or friction.

>>Bringing the circus arts into communities who might not have had access.

It's just one way to preserve a culture enjoyed by so many around the world.

>>Sarasota is unique in in that we have the ballet, we have the opera, we have theaters, but we also have the circus.

What we represent is the present and the future.

Continue the legacy of circus and the community's rich circus heritage.

♪♪ >>Sarasota is surrounded by vibrant colors, the bright green palm trees, the rich blue waters of the bay and the purple Performing Arts Hall >>Sarasota is this amazing jewel of a place that has a lot of arts.

And in 1970, a new space opened: the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall.

We're called the Purple Cow because of our very unique purple color, which is, by the way, part of the design of this building, which was designed by William Wesley Peters.

He is the son in law of a very famous architect, Frank Lloyd Wright.

Frank Lloyd Wright's third wife was walking on a beach in Japan, and she found two particular very beautiful shells and they have a very particular purple color to them.

>>And it was these shells that inspired the look of the performing arts hall.

>>You can see evidence of these shells in the scalloped shape of our roofs, certainly in the color of the building, but also in the wider shape of the building itself.

It really does look like this beautiful purple shell.

>>You'll also find a variety of art displayed on the walls.

>>We have partnered with arts advocates and they have a beautiful collection of artwork that's done by either Florida artists or artists that have some kind of connection to Florida.

>>And we are their primary place to display their artwork.

And the next time you're sitting in the hall, take a good look at where you're sitting.

>>Our folks don't know that the first three rows, if you're sitting there, you're actually sitting on an elevator.

The elevator, then, if we if we brought it all the way down, it becomes part of our orchestra pit.

That's how we get the grand pianos from their storage room.

They go through the orchestra pit onto that elevator, and that's how we bring the elevator up to the stage.

And then that's how we get that the pianos onto the stage.

>>That's right, Grand Pianos, in that they have more than one.

They have three.

And for a very good reason.

>>I don't know how many people know this, but certain artists are have a contract to play on a certain brand of piano.

So some artists only play on a Steinway, so you can't play on a Yamaha if you're a Steinway artist.

And so we have both a Steinway and a Yamaha.

We are a really unique, amazing place that has this I always call it, and it's an embarrassment of riches that we have here.

We have an opera company and a ballet company and an orchestra and multiple professional theaters.

This sort of thing isn't common in a city of our size.

>>People of historical significance in communities may have streets, parks or buildings named for them.

It's one way their legacy continues.

Robert Taylor has a community complex named for him because his impact on the people of Newtown continues for generations.

>>He was a parent home away from home when you came to the rec center here.

You felt safe.

You know you were going to be disciplined.

Your behavior was going to change whatever you had on the street coming up here.

It was time to shake it off and get in the building and behave.

>>Before Arthur Larkins managed the Robert L Taylor Community complex, he visited the rec center as a kid.

>>The only rec center that was available for us from the Newtown community was the Robert L Taylor community complex.

If you went to another community center, you were kind of outside of out of bounds.

>>The complex is named after Robert L Taylor, who was a member of the Newtown community.

To understand his impact, we needed to learn more about the history of Newtown.

>>Overtown was the neighborhood where those early black settlers established homes.

Newtown is the next African-American neighborhood.

It was established in 1914.

>>Many of those living in Overtown left the area and moved to Newtown.

One of the reasons was because the school for black children was moved.

>>That was one of the factors that led people out because children had a long way to walk to school and parents didn't want them walking that far.

Around that time, public housing was being established and public housing did not have the perception that it has now.

It was looked at as ideal housing because those people had electricity.

They had green lawns where in Overtown didn't have these type of amenities.

>>Robert Taylor lived in the Zellwood community in Orange County before moving to Overtown to live with his mom.

>>He was a smart young man.

His family would not allow him to hang out and so much play on the corners with other kids.

They had a plan for his life.

>>After graduating college, he returned to Newtown.

It gave him the opportunity to make a positive impact on the young people in his community.

>>Mr.

Taylor loved this community, and when he was offered the opportunity to run a recreation center, it did not look anything like it looks today.

It was an old USO for black soldiers.

This is where black soldiers would socialize because during that time they could not socialize at the Sarasota airfield.

And so this was transitioned into a recreation center.

And Mr. Taylor planned recreational programs for community children.

>>Taught everybody from Booker High School in the community how to swim.

Booker High School had a class up here that they walked here every day, learned to swim, that was their PE, and walked back to campus.

>>He mentored kids and he would set them on a path to get their education.

He was spending all that time with with neighborhood kids.

So you can call him a surrogate dad for some.

And the legacy of that is that some of these kids went on to get a college education and came back to this community to also work in athletics and recreation.

And they became mentors just as Mr. Taylor mentored them.

>>He showed me how to find people that are from my community, maybe not from our community, and get along with them.

And that all comes through service.

You help people, you you push that limit on you going to be in there.

I'm going to be here for you.

And you push that limit as a as a mentor, as a parent, as a manager.

Then it's a place for you.

This is the place for me.

And I because I got all of his tutelage and leadership now was able to pull me in.

So I can appreciate that.

And I feel honored.

>>Youd never know by the looks of it, but we're in downtown Sarasota.

The Marie Selby Botanical Gardens offers an escape into nature with its roots in history.

>>Marie and Bill Selby, this was their residential property.

Basically, they had purchased about seven acres in order to have a winter residence.

But they came and they loved it so much that they decided to make this their permanent residence.

And they never augmented the historic home.

They really lived modestly.

And they loved this position and this wonderful garden on Sarasota Bay.

And over Selby Gardens, nearly 50 year history, we were able to acquire the adjacent parcels of land to now make up a 15 acre footprint.

>>After Marie Selby's death in 1971, she left the property to the community with the hopes it would become a botanical garden for everyone to enjoy.

It opened to the public on July 7, 1975.

>>This campus is known as the only botanical garden in the world dedicated to the study and display of epiphytes or air plants that grow in the tree canopy instead of the soil.

So we are world renowned for having the best scientifically documented collections of orchids and bromeliads so that's really our claim to fame.

And in recent years, building off of Marie Selby's legacy, we actually adopted a second campus ten miles south of here called our Historic Spanish Point campus.

And that campus really focuses on native Florida.

And what's unique about that campus is that we have about 5,000 years of history represented on that campus.

It's truly old Florida.

>>Historic Spanish Point was the first place in Sarasota to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

In more recent years, they added an interactive butterfly house.

It offers a great opportunity to see the zebra longwing, Florida's state butterfly.

>>Walking the gardens, it's easy to see the beauty of it.

It's an art form on its own.

You'll also find art installations like this inspired by Tiffany.

It's exhibits like this that led to calling themselves a living museum.

>>We're having changing exhibits, programs and events because when I first got here, people would say, Oh, I've been to Selby Gardens.

It's beautiful.

As if they didn't have a reason to come back.

And so now we always have a reason for you to come back.

>>They also have a commitment to science.

They're home to the second largest collection of liquid specimens in the world, second only to the Royal Botanic Gardens.

>>What that means is it's when researchers preserve plants in fluid in a jar, in a preservative, so that they can study the three dimensionality of those plants.

We have more than 35,000 of these.

>>And a new project they're working on will secure their place in international history.

>>We will become the world's first net positive energy botanical garden complex, meaning we will generate more energy than we consume and the world's first of its kind.

So we're really excited.

And overnight, we will become an international leader for sustainability.

>>We're surrounded by both beauty and history here in Sarasota.

Don't forget to keep exploring all of it.

I'm Allison Godlove.

Thank you for joining me for Florida Road Trip and our journey through history.

♪♪ >>Funding for Florida Road Trip was provided through a grant from Florida Humanities with funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities.