Bradenton Beach Grows Up.

From a place where tattooed women once bashed their drunk boyfriends with frying pans up and down Main Street Bradenton Beach has come a long way.

The tiny city on the southern tip of Anna Maria Island is undergoing a renaissance, at least its third since the 1920s. he city's Bridge Street became the focus of commerce and the hub of is and bustle--such as it was back then--when a wooden bridge was built across Sarasota Bay between the village of Cortez and Bradenton Beach in 1921. In its earlier heyday, Bridge Street featured a drugstore, hardware store, gasoline station, a post office, shops and lounges. There was even a Gulfside resort and casino.

In the 1950s, three bridges were built to link Anna Maria Island with the mainland and Longboat Key. A new Cotez Bridge was built five blocks north of the rickety old wooden bridge, which became a rickety fishing pier. The island's downtown languished until the late 1960s. Most of the shops along Bridge Street had been converted to bars, which attracted a rowdy crowd of revelers, leading to lots of police, many arrests and the tattooed lady problem. In fact, the No. 1 problem the city faced then was bar patrons urinating in the streets.

City officials finally passed laws that forced the bars to close at midnight, and the bar owners fought back with lawsuits. The city eventually lost the suits, depleting the city's reserves to pay off bar owners. Bar owners lost, too, as the lounges lost money from the early closing and long legal battle, and one by one most of the bars shut down.

The city coasted through the 1980s and early '90s until developers rediscovered the city, thanks in part to a series of aggressive civic enhancement programs that pumped millions of dollars into revitalizing the city. The results are evident in the real estate pages of local newspapers today: 600-square-foot former fishermen's cottages selling for $250,000; waterfront lots a "steal" at $200,000; $1-million trophy houses under construction along the bayfront; and multi-million dollar condominium projects sprouting and selling as fast as the money can be counted.

Bradenton Beach has indeed come a long way. Again.

WELCOME TO BRADENTON BEACH

Even though Bradenton Beach is only three miles long and less than a half-mile wide at most, it's home to a half-dozen communities.

Just across the bridge from Longboat Key is Coquina Beach, Manatee County's largest public beach--a mecca for beachgoers and the bane of Bradenton Beach. The Gulf-to-Bay beach attracts millions of day trippers from central and southwest Florida each year. Last Easter weekend, more than 5,000 cars were turned away because there just wasn't room for any more vehicles to wedge themselves into the mile-long park.

But even on non-holiday weekends, the influx of visitors causes hours of gridlock on two-lane Gulf Drive, the only north-south road on the Island. Although merchants hoped the 18,000 passing motorists a day (at peak) would beef up sales, the opposite seems to be true. Beachgoers seem to stop only to buy ice or soft drinks--no alcoholic beverages are allowed on beaches in Manatee County--and sales at the shops and restaurants are mostly limited to residents or vacationers staying in the Island's resorts.

East of Coquina Beach is Leffis Key. This 30-acre nature preserve has boardwalks, scenic outlooks and a 45-foot-high mound that offers panoramic views of the Sarasota skyline to the south, the fishing village of Cortez to the east and the Gulf of Mexico to the west. A lagoon system is filled with snook, redfish and bait, and the air is alive with birdsong.

Just north of Coquina Beach is the oldest residential section of the city. Here are the funky fisherman cottages of old, now painted in bright Caribbean colors. Pecky cypress homes feature hardwood pine floors, wide porches, swaying coconut palms outside and wicker furniture throughout. Like most of the rest of the city, though, occasional trophy homes have sprouted amidst the Cracker houses, and some gleaming condos contrast with the faded paint of houses built more than 70 years ago.

Bridge Street, the center of downtown Bradenton Beach, is easy to find, with a roundabout traffic circle at the western approach to slow motorists. The Bridge Street shops of the 1920s are long gone. The old Talitha's Sewing Supplies, for example, is now a T-shirt shop. The gas station has become a Mediterranean-style restaurant. The drugstore is part of a multi-million dollar resort that will have boutiques, offices, a restaurant and fireplace-studded resort rentals. But the Drift In and the Bridge Tender Inn are still there, echoes of earlier, rowdier times--although today's bars are much more subdued.

Continue north along Gulf Drive, past Cortez Road, and you'll come to "condo row." In the late 1980s, when development in the city was at its nadir, city leaders changed zoning requirements to allow a more intense use of the mostly vacant land here to encourage growth. In the late 1990s, developers started snapping up the land and putting in the maximum allowable number of units. City leaders realized, a little late, that the zoning allowed too much growth, but by then most of the property had been gobbled up and developments approved. The city did reject the plans for one four-unit Gulf-front complex and is explaining its reasons in court right now.

Past the S-curve on Gulf Drive "resort row." Rental properties for the day, week or season line both sides of the road. The island's only chain motel, an EconoLodge, is within this stretch of roadway. To the east of Gulf Drive stand single-family homes, many built from concrete block in the 1950s and '60s. Here, too, are the occasions mega-houses, mostly on the water overlooking Anna Maria Sound. One short street, Canasta Lane, is lined with such massive houses, with fountains in courtyards behind the entry gates and panoramic views of the water.

At the north end of Bradenton Beach is perhaps the best example of the dual nature of this city. On the Gulf is the Anna Maria Beach Club, a condominium project that was literally built from the ashes of what may have been city's first building, the Gulf Park Hotel. The three-story building was constructed around the turn of the century; and for decades, it hosted visitors from around the world who came to the Island for the fishing, sun and sand. Because of termites, the third floor was removed in the 1950s, and the building later became a destination for music lovers as the Oar House in the 1970s. In 1979, under suspicious circumstances, it burned to the ground.

Across from the snazzy new condominium that now occupies the old hotel site is the other side of Bradenton Beach--a busy little trailer park. Now called the Sandpiper Mobile Resort, it originally, the Gulf Park Trailer Park, an offshoot of the old hotel. In a city filled with multi-million dollar condominium projects and burgeoning growth, humble trailers can still find a home.

DEVELOPMENT COMES TO TOWN

"There's a different kind of atmosphere in Bradenton Beach," says Emily Anne Smith. She and partner Tom Eatman formed Eatman & Smith Architecture in storefront on Bridge Street in 1994. She had first visited Bradenton Beach in 1948 and decided to move here and "slow down. Instead, I'm working as hard as I did when I left Atlanta."

Smith says the narrowness of the city is a part of its charm. "Everywhere you look, you see water; and water is a biggie for development. You turn your head and see the Gulf or bay any time, and you can't do that on Longboat Key," she points out. "It makes a world of difference in what's happening here. You can find just about any kind of accommodation you could want in Bradenton Beach, and almost everything is within walking distance of each other."

The water may be the city's main draw, but Bradenton Beach got another important asset in the early 1990s. City leaders applied for and received a $500,000 state grant to improve the Bridge Street area. To do so required a state designation as a "blighted area, something city officials quickly put a different spin on by naming it the "historic old-town" section.

Streets were paved. Bricks were placed at crosswalks. Lights and landscaping were installed, as were curbs and better drainage. As a result, the area of decaying old houses and crumbling shacks, where those tattooed women once bashed their men and chickens ran through the streets, got a new lease on life. The first civic improvement project was followed by another $500,000 grant two years later. The second chunk of state cash allowed improvements to march through adjacent streets with more landscaping, lighting, curbing and sidewalks.

Help came from other sources, too. The city bought a lot off Bridge Street and turned it into a parking lot to help with the perennial dearth of places to put cars in the area. Improvements costing more than $600,000 were made to the Bradenton Beach City Pier. What later became the city's signature landmark, a gazebo under a towering spire with four clocks, was erected at the base of the city pier. The Florida Department of Transportation installed the roundabout at Gulf Drive and Bridge Street. In 1993, state and county officials paid for a $14 million beach renourishment project for most of the island, adding 200 feet of width to the Gulf shore. Suddenly, Bradenton Beach had lost its drab appearance.

"The beach renourishment project helped all of the island, but Bradenton Beach most of all," says Gail Cole, whose term as mayor expired in November. "And the state money for Bridge Street took a bad section of town and made it picturesque. It all added to the sophistication of the area."

Enter Barbara Rodocker and daughter Angela. Barbara started in the resort business locally in 1972 when she bought the Silver Sands Resort on Longboat Key. In 1984, she purchased the Silver Surf Resort in "resort row" in Bradenton Beach. She says that even then, she saw the future of the area. "I recognized the community was at the bottom of the economic trough," she remembers. "I looked at it and realized it had nowhere to go but up.

She and partner Angela looked into opportunities in the heart of the downtown area four years ago, and decided the northeast corner of Bridge Street and Gulf Drive was "an ideal location for what we wanted to do, but nothing came out of it at the time. It went on the back burner." The location had an aging restaurant, several older buildings and a number of vacant lots attached to it. It also had a potential condominium project, already planned and approved by city officials. But that project fell through, and the Rodockers stepped up and bought the land. Their vision was a mixed-use project that would combine a resort, retail and a restaurant, says Barbara. "We wanted to build a new center for Bradenton Beach."

Plans for the Rodockers' Bridge Walk project were approved by the city in early 2001, and the resort should open this month. The project will include 28 resort units, four of them townhouses with fireplaces and all with verandas overlooking the Gulf or bay. There will be six stores--beachwear shops, a cottage furniture boutique, jewelry shop, even a coffee-wine-cigar store--plus a 150-seat restaurant "with an awesome view of the Gulf," Barbara says.

Fine dining has already come to Bradenton Beach. Probably the biggest highlight on the cuisine scene is the Beach House restaurant, owned by Ed Chiles, son of the late Florida Gov. Lawton Chiles. Its 450-seat capacity allows seating even in the high season with little wait, and its beachfront locale offers spectacular sunset vistas. Also of note is the Gulf Drive Cafe at Ninth Street North, featuring Belgian waffles, and the Bridge Tender Inn, with an outside deck offering a bayfront view of Cortez.

It took 10 years and almost $1 million for the Bridge Street revitalization to occur, but it did. And it's brought a wealth of new development in its wake.

ACCELERATING RESULTS

Bradenton Beach has reaped the results of its civic improvements. Total taxable value for the city in 1992 was $107 million; for 2002 is it estimated at $225 million. Clawing itself out of the slump in the 1980s, development is now racing ahead at a frenetic pace.

The Bradenton Beach Club, a 44-unit condominium project in the 1700 block of Gulf Drive, has broken ground and should have residents enjoying the bayfront view by mid-2002. Units start at about $400,000, with bayfront much higher. Resorts such as Tortuga Inn, the Tradewinds and Silver Surf have undergone serious renovations and expansions in the past few year and are reaping the rewards of their foresight with record-breaking occupancy figures.

And the single-family market has exploded. Smith says the trend on the island and in Bradenton Beach so far has been to renovate existing homes rather than rear them down to build new. "There is substantial value in homes on the ground," she says, "so homeowners do as much as they can under the federal regulations to renovate." Federal rules generally dictate elevating new homes or older houses that add more than 50 percent of their value in renovations. Homeowners want to live on the ground floor, Smith says, so they usually attempt to renovate existing houses. She estimates that only 20 percent of her business on the island involves tear-downs.

The prices for homes is astounding to any longtime Bradenton Beach resident--for example, a duplex on Gulf Drive selling for $895,000; a bayfront 40-year-old home with 100 feet of bay frontage selling for $570,000; or a landlocked Gulfview duplex for $530,000. Realtors complain the biggest problem they have isn't selling houses, it's finding houses to list for sale; and sellers are unwilling to negotiate on prices. What you see is what you'll pay.

Even seasonal rentals reflect escalating land values. A two-bedroom, two-bathroom house on a canal brings upward of $3,000 a month during the "high season" of January-April. Bayfront or Gulf-front accommodations are even pricier.

"Although I see that Bradenton Beach has had a lot of development, it's a bittersweet thing," admits Mike Norman, owner of Mike Norman Real Estate. He has spent 25 years selling property in Bradenton Beach and on Anna Maria Island. "Kids that were raised here and are now adults can no longer afford to live here."

Norman's comment gets support from the change in Anna Maria Elementary School's student population. It's one of a handful of Manatee County schools that has reported a drop in attendance in the past few years. Families with young people just can't afford to either buy or rent on the Island.

WHAT'S NEXT?

Despite federal and state economic doom-and-gloom predictions, Bradenton Beach is prepared to ride out the building boom for the next few years, at least.

"We're working on a $1 million house in south Bradenton Beach," Emily Anne Smith says, "and it's not the owner's primary home."

"Another big piece in the puzzle is the scenic highway designation," adds John Chappie. Chappie, who has served on the city commission since 1996 and was recently vice mayor, was involved in the city's long-range growth plan in 1989 and since then has served on a number of advisory boards and committees. The state accepted Gulf Drive in Bradenton Beach as part of its scenic highway program, opening up state and federal grants for things like landscape improvements, streetlights, information kiosks--anything to enhance the corridor. State funds have also been approved for bike lanes on both sides of the road, with work scheduled to begin in two years.

In an effort to combat the traffic congestion, Manatee County has funded an island-wide trolley system that will pick up riders every 20 minutes from a score of stops all over the Island. The trolley will be free and operate seven days a week from 6:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. The open-air and air-conditioned rubber-wheel trolleys will begin operation in January.

"It amazes me how it all fits together as one big puzzle," Chappie says of the grants, improvements and economic revitalization. "But we need to draw the line, too, and sometimes we have to slow down. We have to make sure that we don't lose that Bradenton Beach feel. We always run the risk for having runaway development, and we have to make certain that it doesn't get out of control. But it's finally all coming together."