The $57 million downtown building would include three venues and affordable housing for performers.
By Ramon Lopez
Original Air Date: December 6, 2024
Host: Florida Studio Theatre has ambitious plans for an eight-story building on their campus in downtown Sarasota that will cost it a cool $57 million. City planners discussed the proposal this week, and Ramon Lopez got the details.
Ramon Lopez: A new major downtown Sarasota theatre project is working its way through the City of Sarasota’s administrative process. The Development Review Committee this past Wednesday got a first look at Florida Studio Theatre’s ambitious $57 million Arts Plaza.
The Arts Plaza will include three new performance venues, taking up two levels at the bottom of the building and three floors of indoor parking below three stories of housing for visiting performers, artists and art workers.
The one-hour session before the DRC was anchored by consultant Joel Freedman, who laid out the basic floor plan for the eight-story mixed-use building. The city workers will get more information regarding, parking, signage and tree removal when they next discuss FST’s project on January 3rd.
Arts Plaza rendering. Courtesy FST
The Arts Plaza will include 18 residential units, 39 hotel rooms, and over 24,000 square feet of theatre space. Two new 100-seat cabaret theaters and a third mainstage with 237 seats are planned. The Arts Plaza will be built on downtown’s First Street adjacent to FST’s existing Hegner Theatre Wing, which houses the Gompertz main stage. The garage entrance will be accessed from an alley behind the current facility, between First and Second Streets. The $57 million build project is being bankrolled by cash contributions from theatre patrons, a $1 million workforce housing grant from the State of Florida, and sale of 18 houses scattered near downtown Sarasota, and currently housing FST interns and visiting performers.
Hopkins
The current construction timetable calls for ground breaking in April 2025, says Rebecca Hopkins, FST’s managing director.
Rebecca Hopkins: We’re submitting for permit today, this week. We have to go through that process. We’re hoping to break ground in April, but we have to get through all the city hurdles and the city has been put behind as has everyone by too back to back. So the process has been slowed down by that which is what is pushing us into the goal of April.
RL: Construction begins next year, with the parking garage and residences available in 2026. The two cabarets open for business in 2027, and the new mainstage will begin operating in 2028.
Joel Freedman says adding houses and parking were key considerations:
The location: On First Street.
Joel Freedman: It’s amazing the number of residential units they manage throughout the city for the actors and staff. So the thought is, by bringing all that into one building, it’s going to be much easier, much more cost effective. So that’s why we have both an apartment group that will be for more of the longer term people, but also the hotel will serve … sometimes actors are in there for a couple weeks. And it’ll be open to the public. But it’ll also be used for those quick turnaround people for the, for the actors. So it’s pretty exciting really. And obviously parking is seriously in shortage down in that area when everything’s going on.
RL: Hopkins says the $57 million in needed funding is achievable.
RH: It’s a big buy, absolutely. But we’ve planned it and we took time. I mean, this project has been very slow to move forward because after the pandemic, prices skyrocketed. We took the time necessary to step back, revamp, and put together a new campaign.
The size of the building has changed in order to get it down to an achievable goal. It’s going to take us the next three years to get there so that we can do it, but we don’t take it for granted. This is all money from the communities of people donating to us. But I think the will is behind there and based on our fundraising so far, I have every reason to believe we can get there.
RL: The last major expansion project for FST was in 2012 for the Hegner Theatre Wing. The new building also comes after FST’s 50th Anniversary last year.
To say this project is key to FST’s development would be an understatement.
RH: It is addressing our most significant needs. First and foremost, we absolutely need the housing. Our artists here in residence, on average, from three to six months, living and working in this community, they need and deserve nice housing. And with Sarasota real estate prices the way they are, this is how we do that. Rentals are not even a possibility. And so we had a choice: we could either renovate our existing housing or build new. And this is much more effective, and will allow us to grow out our programming; it will be stable for the next 20 years.
We have parking, but downtown is just getting busier and busier, and this is kind of what we need to keep enough available. Cabaret is already maxed out. We’re running 52 weeks a year. I cannot grow the winter subscription anymore. Yet we have people wanting to come, the town is growing. So we want to serve those people, so this will allow for that natural growth. This is all about existing programming. It allows us to stabilize and settle and grow existing programming to serve the community. We’ve always grown that way. Every theater we’ve built has not been about if we build it, they will come; it’s because they’re coming, we need to build. It meets all of our existing needs and positions the theater for the next 20 here.
RL: This is Ramon Lopez for WSLR News.
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