Facing a board member with a tape measure, 99 angry neighbors and a bombshell phone call to Jupiter, 1000 North retreats to fight another day.
—In basketball, when the game starts slipping away, you call timeout. On Wednesday afternoon at Sarasota City Hall, the private club that has draped itself in Michael Jordan’s aura did exactly that.
—After nearly two hours of withering scrutiny, 1000 North Sarasota, the ultra-exclusive members club built and nearly finished inside the BLVD condominium tower at Tamiami Trail and Boulevard of the Arts, asked the Planning Board to continue its own application indefinitely rather than risk a vote. The board granted the retreat 5-0, sending the club, its valet plan and its feuding neighbors off to a date uncertain, to be re-advertised and re-noticed whenever the applicant is ready to try again.
—For a club that has been selling $60,000-a-year memberships, offering hard-hat tours and running a countdown clock toward a fall opening, the timeout is a stunning turn. The space is built. The walnut is hung. The wine lockers gleam. What 1000 North still does not have is the city approval that makes any of it legal to operate.
“We’ve heard the residents, and I finally got in touch with Mr. Daves, and he agrees, let’s take a breather,” the applicant’s planner, Joel Freedman, told the board, referring to developer Kevin Daves, who built the BLVD and owns its commercial units. “It’s going to take some time. Let’s figure all this out. Get the condo attorneys looking at it, get the off-site parking agreement established officially, and let’s go on from there.”
—A Board Member Brings a Tape Measure
—The hearing was supposed to be a cleanup operation. The club’s first appearance on Aug. 19 had collapsed over typographical errors and a parking count that did not add up, and Wednesday was framed narrowly: fix the paperwork, prove the parking. The paperwork got fixed. The parking got worse.
—Board member Alexander Neihaus arrived having done something rare in the annals of advisory boards: homework with a tape measure. He disclosed that he had visited the BLVD’s parking garage himself, walked the second level with the building’s general manager, and measured the spaces on the applicant’s shiny new valet plan.
—The results were not kind. The zoning code, Neihaus established with city planner Camden Jenkins, defines a parking space as eight and a half feet wide by 18 feet deep. The revised plan proposes stacking two cars nose-to-tail in certain spots, which requires 36 feet of depth. Neihaus measured one of those tandem runs at 29 feet, 6 inches.
“Do we check the site plans to see whether things will actually fit?” he asked the city, in what may have been the afternoon’s most quietly devastating question.
—It got worse from there. The club needs 27 spaces by code. Its revised plan claims 32, including eight spaces on the garage’s second floor, behind a gate. But the legal document the applicant itself submitted to justify those spaces, an amendment to the condominium’s declaration, says those second-floor valet spots are limited to visitors of the residential units, and that the association can restrict their use. There is no agreement with the association. The club’s theory, Freedman explained, is that resident members’ dinner guests count as residential visitors.
—Neihaus was unmoved, noting the space numbers on the applicant’s plan do not even match the exhibit in the condo documents. “I’m confused about where these spots actually are,” he said.
—By the time the board reached open discussion, the frustration was general. “It seems like we’re just kind of like, well, we’ve got the parking spaces here somewhere, we can jam the cars in someplace, everything will be fine,” one board member said. “I’m just not sure that I’m comfortable with that.”
—Neihaus delivered the closing verdict directly to the applicant’s table: “This plan was fungible. Well, if you don’t like this, we’ll put this in front of you. That was the message from last time. Give us something we can evaluate according to the standards for review that’s definitive, compliant and, frankly, acceptable.”
—Ninety-Nine Residents and One Baby
—Upstairs from the future dining room live the people who bought into the BLVD, and they came down to City Hall in force. Brenda Dunn told the board she was speaking for 99 residents “and one baby,” and her testimony reframed the entire fight.
—The residents, she said, are not anti-club. “We expected the Beach Bistro when we moved in, and we’d welcome a compatible neighbor that respects residents’ rights and our governing documents,” Dunn said. But 1000 North, at more than 13,000 square feet, is roughly twice the size of the restaurant the building was designed around, “and that’s why they’re short of parking.”
—She walked the board through a typical club evening as residents see it coming: valets sprinting, cars stacking, Ubers idling, delivery trucks squeezing past, all funneled into the same confined ground floor that contains the residents’ lobby stairs, their handicapped ramp and their pedestrian walkway to Fifth Street. “They plan to cram 24 vehicles into an 11-space lot,” she said, “leaving no space for this vital pathway.”
—Then came the accusation that landed hardest. Many residents, Dunn said, initially welcomed the club and joined it. “As soon as the board challenged the unauthorized takeover, the applicant canceled club memberships for all enrolled Boulevard residents.”
—The Call to Jupiter
—The afternoon’s true bombshell belonged to Patrick McNamee, a member of the BLVD’s condominium board who also serves as president of the Downtown Sarasota Condominium Association. By the time he reached the podium, Dr. Abraham Morgentaler, a BLVD resident and former president of its condominium association, had already methodically dismantled the parking plan, spot by disputed spot, noting that the condo amendment the applicant cited as a “2023 amendment” was actually recorded in 2021 and says the opposite of what the applicant claims. McNamee went after the club’s most valuable asset: its name.
—He told the board he personally telephoned Ira Fenton, the managing partner of the original 1000 North in Jupiter, the storied club whose founding partners include Jordan, golf legend Ernie Els and former New York Giant Tucker Frederickson. According to McNamee’s sworn testimony, Fenton was unaware of the Sarasota property dispute and asked to be copied on future correspondence. What arrived instead was an email from 1000 North Jupiter to the association’s attorney stating that it “has no ownership interest in either 1000 North Sarasota or the referenced premises” and asking to be removed from all future notices.
—And McNamee did not merely describe the email. He put it up on the screen in the commission chambers, displaying it for the board and the audience to read and entering it into the public record of the hearing.
“So this isn’t backed by Michael Jordan,” McNamee told the board, “and I don’t know why it’s being presented that way.”
—The club’s representatives did not respond to that claim during the hearing. The distinction may ultimately be one of ownership versus brand: 1000 North Sarasota has always described itself as modeled after and associated with the Jupiter flagship, an expansion of the brand rather than a subsidiary of the club. But for a project whose marketing, its press coverage and its waiting list have leaned hard on the wattage of His Airness, a written disclaimer of ownership from Jupiter, projected onto a City Hall screen and read into a public record under oath, is not the kind of assist the club was looking for.
—The residents’ ask was simple. “Why approve a plan that cannot be implemented?” Morgentaler said. “What’s the harm in waiting until these questions are answered?”
—By day’s end, the applicant agreed with him.
—The City Draws Its Line
—City staff, for the record, never wavered. Jenkins told the board the corrected application and the 32-space valet plan still exceed the 27-space requirement, and staff still recommended approval. Lucia Panica, the city’s director of development services, noted that the building’s original 2017 site plan showed the second-floor spaces as plain valet spaces, no strings attached, though board members countered that the applicant’s own subsequent condo amendment attached the strings itself.
—Deputy City Attorney John Shamsey spent the afternoon patrolling the line between what the board can decide and what it cannot. Whether the parking physically works is the board’s business, he said. Who actually controls the garage is not.
“The city is not going to solve this private condo dispute,” Shamsey said. “It doesn’t matter if the Planning Board votes to approve it or votes to deny it, that private dispute is probably going to live on.” The club could win approval and lose in court, he noted, or lose at the board and win in court. Either way, the lawyers eat.
—A Sip of Consolation
—The day was not a total shutout for the Daves camp. Minutes after the club’s retreat, the board took up the companion application for the Wine Concierge, a 484-square-foot appointment-only wine shop planned for the small corner office space at 1224 Boulevard of the Arts, in the same building. Freedman pitched it as the rarest of retail animals: a store selling “very unique, expensive wines,” open weekdays 9 to 5, by appointment only, with purchases delivered to the buyer’s home rather than carried out the door, and a discreet decal on the window in lieu of signage.
—The board, visibly relieved to consider something that required exactly one parking space, approved it 5-0, with Neihaus amending the conditions to lock in the appointment-only operation. Board member Douglas Christy summed up the market positioning: “I’m not buying wine there,” he said. “Things I can’t afford, either way.”
—Board member Tiffany Nisbet, the panel’s newest member, got the day’s biggest laugh when she opened her questioning of the wine shop with, “How wide is your parking spot? Just kidding.”
—What Happens Now
—The club leaves City Hall with homework. Freedman said the team will bring in condominium attorneys to sort out who controls what in the garage, convert its handshake parking deals into a formal off-site parking agreement, and return with a plan the board can actually verify. Those handshake deals, disclosed for the first time Wednesday, include 15 spaces at the voco hotel across the street, 10 spaces at Rosemary District entrepreneur Anand Pallegar’s lot at 1370 Boulevard of the Arts, and an informal understanding with The Sarasota Modern hotel, none of which currently satisfies the letter of the code. City staff confirmed the club is not required to park itself entirely on site, but a formal off-site agreement must follow the city’s rules. As one official dryly noted, the parking cannot be in Bradenton.
—Hanging over it all is the question no one at the applicant’s table would put a date on: when does the club actually open? The buildout is essentially complete. The membership rolls have been growing since spring. The adjacent 10,500-square-foot parcel the club bought, which residents pointedly noted could hold a parking structure, sits waiting. And somewhere between the walnut bar and the wine lockers, a countdown clock is now counting toward a date no one can name.
—In this town, even His Airness has to find a parking spot.
