Nearly every person who has spent time on St. Armands Circle — residents, tourists, locals guiding out-of-town friends and family — has a memory about the retail and restaurant mecca. A lobster dinner at a fancy restaurant. A pair of shoes bought with friends. An ice cream cone.
Sarasota resident and urban planner Philip DiMaria’s Circle story revolves around his parents. His dad was a police officer who worked at Ground Zero after 9/11 with the NYPD. The DiMaria family — young Philip was in elementary school — visited Sarasota for a much-needed vacation in 2002. His parents, in a not-so-unfamiliar story, loved the area so much they moved here soon after visiting. And in retelling their Sarasota origin story to their kids, they often cite the Circle as their favorite spot. “St. Armands is basically why my parents moved here,” says DiMaria, who attended middle school and high school in Lakewood Ranch and Sarasota, before going to University of Florida and graduating from Arizona State. Now, he’s a project manager with engineering, planning and design firm Kimley-Horn.
In the shadow of these memories, the Circle faces a conundrum: A trio of 2024 storms — Debby, Helene and Milton — led to a variety of flooding issues, causing millions of dollars in damage. Nearly every store was impacted. Some closed and reopened, others moved, others left for good…