The Commercial Real Estate Alpha Site

By Jeff LaHurd Correspondent via Herald Tribune

After Henry Ford’s Tin Lizzie opened travel to the masses, progressive towns and cities throughout the nation, and particularly Florida, considered at the time America’s “Last Frontier,” made road building a priority.

No matter how many amenities that Florida communities had to offer tourists in the way of beauty, weather, beaches and attractions, if they could not be easily reached it was all for naught.

Into the 1920s, the railroads and steamship lines of Henry Flagler and Henry Plant that opened Florida to the wealthy were still the transportation means of choice. Flagler pushed his line along the east coast, opening luxury hotels along the way; while Plant captured the west coast market. (When Plant completed the Tampa Bay Hotel — today’s University of Tampa — he sent a telegram to Flagler inviting him to the grand opening ball. Flagler wired back, “Where the hell is Tampa Bay?” — to which Plant retorted, “Just follow the crowd.”)

In 1926, “Florida In The Making” noted, “a program of highway construction, which can only be regarded as gigantic, is being actively and aggressively carried through from Pensacola to Key West.”

Even before Sarasota County was established in 1921, and before the ensuing real estate boom, a group of progressive citizens bent on pushing this area forward, and given voice by the Sarasota Times, lobbied mightily for road improvements in an effort to grow the community.

They set their sights on a proposed thoroughfare that would run from Tampa to Miami — the “Tamiami Trail.”

The notion that such a highway could be built was deemed impossible by many, even laughable. Much of the terrain seemed impassable: the heretofore impregnable Florida Everglades was a swampland infested with alligators, snakes, wild boars, wildcats and clouds of threatening mosquitoes and other irritable insects; necessary contributions of communities to link the highway along the way as it passed through succeeding counties had to be obtained; and stifling hot weather and lightning-laced downpours added to the misery. No wonder the early advocates were scoffed for proposing it.

After years of gargantuan effort, constructed it was, and Sarasota’s stretch, particularly the portion we know as the North Tamiami Trail, is a veritable timeline that traces our history, from the early days when it was platted as Banana Ave. in 1885, to the more sophisticated sounding Broadway Avenue in the Roaring ’20s, to today’s condo-infused North Trail.

‘One of the finest drives in all America’

The last barricades from the Tampa to Sarasota portion of the “wide and smooth” Trail were removed on Oct. 19, 1926.

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