Sunday, Oct. 05, 2008

A trip back in time through Old Florida neighborhoods

"Whitfield Estates - the Jewel of Florida's Western Coast."

The bold type headlining the promotional material spread across Bill and Debbie Partridge's dining room table was fascinating to read.

It was real estate advertising from the mid-1920s during Florida's land boom.

Buyers were being sought for a grand venture that the Oct. 8, 1924, edition of Bradenton's Evening Herald trumpeted as "TOWN TO RIVAL CORAL GABLES TO BE BUILT SOUTH OF HERE."

It was an amusing pitch, too, looking back 80 years later.

"At Sarasota, the City of Millionaires . . ." another headline went. " . . . in the Land of Manatee, the World's Richest Back Country."

Back country?

"That meant Myakka and everything behind here," said Bill Partridge, a prominent attorney whose handsome 1925 home, fronted by two massive 300-year-old oaks, sits between Sarasota Bay and Westmoreland Drive in Whitfield Estates.

"My mini-Tara," said Debbie Partridge, like her husband, a Demopolis, Ala., native, referring to the plantation home of Scarlett O'Hara in "Gone with the Wind."

It was one of the first homes built as part of a development that bore the name of financier Louis Broughton Whitfield, but would also involve giants such as legendary golf course designer Donald Ross and golf icon Bobby Jones, as well as Jones' boyhood pal, Perry Adair, whose Atlanta-based Adair Realty and Trust Co. was renowned nationwide.

The plan was for a 682-acre community that would include a regal tourist hotel of 200 rooms on Sarasota Bay, a yacht basin and club, an 18-hole golf course and high end business district.

"Their vision was to create a community unlike any other in Sarasota and Manatee counties," said Norm Luppino, a county planner and president of the Whitfield-Ballentine Manor Association.

The collapse of Florida's land boom in 1927 took those big designs down with it.

Still, of the 61 homes that were built, Luppino estimates two-thirds remain, along with the Villa Serena, an apartment complex, near the Sara Bay Golf and Country Club.

Among them are four attractive Mediterranean Revival style homes along Broughton Street, listed in the National Register of Historic Places. They were designed by Ralph Twitchell, a celebrated Sarasota architect, whose work is associated with the Ca da Zan and St. Armand's Circle.

There are 15 houses plus the Villa Serena listed on the National Register. Six plus the Villa Serena are east of the Trail. The rest are west of it.

That the Partridge home is not on the National Register doesn't diminish its charm one bit.

Take it from their daughter, Kameron, who used to roller skate across its wooden floors as a child.

She's now a vice-president with Easter Seals of Southwest Florida.

"This house was a big part of my growing up - kites in the backyard, climbing the trees, getting muddy," said Partridge, 30. "It's a very southern home. The blessing here and what you see in the rest of this community is so much diversity."