With Jordan, Ernie Els and Serena Williams on the marquee and $6,000 annual dues on the menu, 1000 North seeks approval Wednesday amid a parking shuffle and a revolt upstairs.
—If the Sarasota Planning Board says yes Wednesday night, the best-heeled of Sarasota may soon be drinking at the court of His Royal Airness in the heart of downtown.
—Michael Jordan, the man who turned hang time into a global empire, is a founding partner of 1000 North, the ultra-exclusive private dining club whose second location has been quietly taking shape behind construction barriers on the ground floor of the BLVD Sarasota tower at the corner of North Tamiami Trail and Boulevard of the Arts. Alongside Jordan on the founders’ roster: golf legend Ernie Els, former New York Giant Tucker Frederickson, Wine Spectator publisher Marvin Shanken, wine magnate Bill Terlato and club founder and developer Ira Fenton. Serena Williams, Ahmad Rashad and Bryant Gumbel are among the partners in the flagship Jupiter club that gave the brand its name.
—Now the star power meets the fluorescent lights of City Hall. On Wednesday, Sept. 9, the Planning Board takes up the club’s Administrative Site Plan and Minor Conditional Use applications, continued from a special meeting on Aug. 19 that went sideways over typos, hard-to-read drawings, a parking count that did not add up, and a group of upstairs neighbors who arrived with accusations that go well beyond zoning.
—City planning staff recommends approval with conditions. But the evening will be anything but a rubber stamp, and the stakes reach past one restaurant. The vote is a referendum of sorts on what downtown Sarasota is becoming: a district where the towers sell for $3 million to $12 million, the champagne comes with a dress code, and the hottest reservation in town is one you cannot make unless you are asked.
—A Club Built Before Its Blessing
—Here is the wrinkle that makes Wednesday interesting: 1000 North Sarasota is essentially finished asking permission for something it is nearly finished building.
—The 13,025-square-foot space, spread across the first floor and mezzanine of the 18-story BLVD condominium, was approved for restaurant use back when the tower was permitted in 2017 and 2018. The building opened in 2020, and the prime corner commercial space sat empty for years while developer Kevin Daves, who built the BLVD and retained ownership of its commercial units, hunted for the right tenant. Daves, the man who brought Sarasota The Ritz-Carlton and The Concession Golf Club, found one with serious wattage: the Jupiter private club whose membership rolls read like a sports Hall of Fame induction weekend.
—The catch is in the fine print of the city’s zoning code. A restaurant open to the public is allowed by right in the Downtown Bayfront zone district. A private club, open only to members and their guests, requires a Minor Conditional Use approval, a public hearing, and a Planning Board vote. So while crews have spent months installing walnut millwork and brass-trimmed wine lockers, the entitlement that makes it all legal has lagged behind, with the club racing toward a fall opening it has been advertising for months. The club’s website counts down under the tagline “Anticipate The Extraordinary!”
—The application was accepted last November, cleared the Development Review Committee in June, and finally reached the Planning Board on Aug. 19, where things promptly unraveled. Board members were told the application forms carried scrivener’s errors in the property identification numbers and ownership name. The graphics were too blurry to read. And the valet parking plan showed fewer spaces than the narrative claimed. The board continued the hearing to Sept. 9, and the applicant’s planner, Joel Freedman, filed a stack of corrected forms, sharper drawings and a revised valet plan on Aug. 27.
—The Valet Math
—Parking has been the recurring theme since the project’s community workshop last September, when neighbors questioned whether the promised number of cars could physically fit in the ground-floor valet area.
—The arithmetic works like this. The city requires one parking space per 500 square feet, which means the club needs 27 spaces. A companion wine store planned by the same ownership adds one more, for a total of 28 required. The revised valet plan filed last month shows 32 commercial valet spaces, 24 on the ground floor and eight on the second floor of the parking garage, spaces the applicant says are reserved to the commercial units under a recorded amendment to the condominium’s declaration. The revised plan also removed valet spaces that had been drawn next to the loading zone, one of the sore points from the first hearing.
—Every club guest will be required to use the valet. The drop-off lane outside the main entrance is designed to stack four to five vehicles, staffed by Southwest Parking Company, with employees parking off site and the club offering limousine pick-up and drop-off for members. The wine store, the applicant proffers, will only operate during daytime hours when the club is closed, so the two uses never compete for the same asphalt.
—Staff signed off. An initial transportation concurrency analysis found the traffic impact de minimis, requiring no traffic study, and the city’s engineering division approved the plan.
—Trouble Upstairs
—The louder fight Wednesday may come from inside the building itself.
—The BLVD’s 49 residences sit atop the club space, and some of their owners have flooded the city with objections, not to fine dining downstairs, but to what they say the developer has built outside it. In letters included in the public record, residents JoAnn Shrier and Robert Gordon, and Dr. Abraham Morgentaler, a former president of the condominium association’s board, allege that construction crews erected a steel-girder mezzanine platform spanning the building’s loading dock, complete with air conditioning units, mechanical equipment and a concrete generator pad, on more than 5,000 square feet of common-element property that belongs to the building’s unit owners, not the commercial developer.
—The residents say the work rendered the loading dock unusable, pushing delivery trucks and moving vans onto Fifth Way, and that none of the exterior construction appeared in plans submitted to the city, which they say promised interior finishes only. Morgentaler’s letter uses the word fraud and demands the city suspend the applications, halt the work, and order the structures torn down. The association, the letters say, sent a cease-and-desist that went unanswered while construction continued.
The city has drawn a careful line. At the Aug. 19 hearing, Deputy City Attorney John Shamsey told the board that who has the right to build what in the condominium’s common elements is a civil dispute, one likely headed for mediation or a judge, and not a question the Planning Board is empowered to decide. The board’s job Wednesday is narrower: whether the private club use, as proposed, meets the zoning code’s standards for site plans and conditional uses. Staff says it does, on all counts, from compatibility to traffic to public health and safety.
—That legal framing may not stop residents from making their case at the podium. It rarely does.
—What $6,000 a Year Buys
—Assuming approval, what exactly is coming to the corner of 41 and Boulevard of the Arts?
—Start downstairs: a fine dining restaurant seating 179, built around steaks, seafood and seasonal ingredients, with sommelier-curated wine, rotating visits from celebrity chefs, tasting menus and tableside French service, the theatrical old-world style in which dishes are finished and plated beside your table. A floating staircase rises to the 70-seat mezzanine, where the private dining room, wine tasting lounge and members’ wine and liquor lockers live. There is a piano bar with live entertainment, plans for salon-style talks and culinary events, and a concierge team promising to arrange everything from private aviation to yachts.
—The build-out is its own flex. The club says more than 2.1 miles of walnut run through the space, roughly the distance from its front door to St. Armands Circle. The bar top is quartzite veined in green. The sound system is invisible, embedded in the architecture. Backup internet and a generator stand guard over the wine rooms, and the televisions pair with members’ own earbuds by Bluetooth, up to 2,000 devices per screen, so the room stays quiet even when the game is on.
—Membership is by invitation, with a form on the club’s website that pointedly asks who invited you. Annual dues run $6,000, on top of an initiation fee the club declines to disclose. Three tiers are planned: a residents membership for BLVD condo owners, founder memberships for a select group of community leaders, and general memberships, with an early goal of roughly 200 members. Demand, the club says, has outrun projections, so much so that 1000 North went under contract this spring to buy the adjacent 10,500-square-foot parcel between the BLVD and The Sarasota Modern hotel to expand the club before it even opens, with jobs projections climbing from about 40 to between 60 and 80. Members have already been offered hard-hat tours of the unfinished space, exclusivity as a preview of exclusivity.
—The proffered hours are genteel: 4 to 11 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 4 p.m. to midnight Friday, 10 a.m. to midnight Saturday, and 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday.
—The Neighborhood That Money Built
—The club is not landing in a vacuum. It is landing in the middle of the most concentrated vertical wealth Sarasota has ever assembled.
—Directly across Boulevard of the Arts, the Quay is sprouting pillars in the sky at a pace that would make a 1920s land boomer blush. One Park, the 18-story tower that topped off this year, is selling residences from $3.5 million to $12.5 million, every unit with an outdoor kitchen on the balcony. Next door, the Ritz-Carlton Residences, Sarasota Bay is finishing 78 condominiums priced from roughly $4 million to more than $12 million, with two more towers planned behind it. Bayso delivered 149 luxury condos. One Park West is on deck. A short stroll south on Palm Avenue, the Mira Mar Residences will stack 70 homes priced from $3.8 million into two 18-story towers behind the restored 1922 plaza. And the BLVD itself, the club’s own address, put 49 residences in the sky above the future dining room.
—That is the customer base, and it is why the private club wave keeps building. Sugar Champagne Bar opened on Pineapple Avenue in March of last year with caviar, a pink Rolls-Royce and, briefly, a $150-per-person minimum. The St. Regis Longboat Key, The Ritz-Carlton and the Longboat Key Club have long traded in gated luxury out on the islands. What 1000 North represents is that model planting its flag in the middle of downtown: not a restaurant you discover, but a room you are admitted to. At last year’s community workshop, the club’s own team put it plainly when asked whether the project would benefit the surrounding Rosemary District: yes, they believe it will be an asset.
Skeptics will note that an asset you cannot enter is a curious kind of public benefit. Supporters will answer with jobs, tax base, foot traffic and the simple observation that the space sat dark for six years.
—Wednesday Night
The Planning Board’s choices are straightforward. It can find the applications consistent with the zoning code and approve them with staff’s conditions, including the proffered hours and compliance with the final plans. It can attach additional conditions. Or it can find the standards unmet and deny.
—Staff’s report leaves little suspense about the professional recommendation: the use fits the Downtown Bayfront district, whose stated purpose includes exactly this mix of restaurants, entertainment and lodging; the building already exists; nothing changes outside; and the parking now pencils out with room to spare.
—The suspense is human. A board that felt burned by sloppy paperwork three weeks ago will scrutinize the corrections. Residents who believe their loading dock was taken from them will have three minutes apiece to say so. And somewhere beyond it all, a club with a countdown clock and a waiting list is betting that by the time the season’s first snowbirds land, Sarasota’s newest throne room will be pouring.
His Airness, presumably, does not like to be kept waiting.
