Imagine growing up along the shores of Sarasota’s Phillippi Creek, back in the more bucolic 1950s and ’60s, in a house surrounded by lush vegetation—loquat, kumquat, tangerine, orange, grapefruit, mango and Surinam cherry trees providing fruit ripe for the picking. There, a child could run wild in a sort of organized jungle, catching fish and trapping blue crabs, playing atop ancient Indian middens (and dodging alligators) and visiting the neighbor next door who stored big glass jars of old arrowheads on the shelves of his kitchen.
Then imagine this as well: This house is also home to an artist’s studio with a northern light, as well as a Florida refuge for visiting artists, musicians and friends from all over the country who gather to get away from the cold, create new work, and enjoy convivial company.
This was the home, from 1950 to 1968, of famed Abstract Expressionist artist Syd Solomon, his wife, renowned hostess Annie, and their children, Michele and Mike. There, nature, painting, and sculpting, and an almost never-ending round of parties combined for what seems to have been an idyllic existence.
That’s according to the memories of Mike Solomon, who spent most of his early years in that house on Portland Street. It was a home constructed at least 20 years prior to the Solomons’ acquisition of it, as a part of Sarasota’s historic Maine Colony—built by a group of Mainers who decided to make the neighborhood, bordered by Swift and Ashton roads, their winter getaway. Fittingly, the Solomon home was built by a man named Frank X. Jannelle, a Maine native who happened to be a friend of New England landscape and seascape painter Winslow Homer.
“I don’t think Jannelle was an artist,” says Mike Solomon, “but he was maybe a craftsman. He definitely built this house. One of the reasons it was so extraordinary was all the detail work—huge pecky cypress beams and a high level of craftsmanship that a New England builder would have had. It had these steep roofs—snow roofs [per New England weather expectations]—and huge oak trees with all the moss. It was a split-level house, with the first floor built on a high level, so underneath was a garage that led out to the river. When Jannelle built it, it had railroad tracks that led down to the river. There was just so much mystery as a child living there.” (By the way, the house still stands today.)
The Solomons, so well-known as leaders of the Sarasota artists’ and writers’ colony, first arrived here on Jan. 1, 1946—the same day the Ringling Museum opened officially to the public. Syd, a World War II vet who had suffered frostbite during the Battle of the Bulge, was looking for a warm weather escape, and the couple first found a home on 39th Street, relatively near the museum. They became fast friends with the museum’s new and forward-thinking director, Arthur Everett “Chick” Austin Jr., who had just left his position at Connecticut’s prestigious Wadsworth Atheneum to lead the Ringling…