This week in our “Lost but Not Forgotten” series, we’re highlighting a Sarasota landmark that has become almost invisible with time.
Shadowed by modern towers along South Palm Avenue, the surviving Mira Mar Hotel blends quietly among Mediterranean Revival storefronts and newer development. If you didn’t know its history, you might walk right past it without ever realizing you were passing a century-old building, one of the few surviving pieces of Sarasota’s roaring 1920s boom years.
Much of the original Mira Mar is gone. The grand hotel and auditorium that once defined Sarasota’s social scene disappeared decades ago, replaced by changing tastes and changing times. Yet part of the original apartment building still remains, offering a glimpse into an era when Sarasota first imagined itself as a glamorous Gulf Coast destination.
Constructed during Sarasota’s explosive land boom of the early 1920s, the Mira Mar Apartments-Hotel was one of the largest building projects the city had ever seen. Chicago industrialist Andrew McAnsh envisioned an elegant Mediterranean Revival destination overlooking Sarasota Bay, complete with luxury apartments, a hotel and an auditorium that would quickly become one of the city’s premier gathering places. The Sarasota County Times heralded the project as “the dawn of a new era in the city’s history of development.”…