The Sarasota Players: Ninth Street to Payne Park | Danielle Gladding & Co. Realty

For more than eighty years there was a theater on the corner of Ninth Street and the Tamiami Trail, at 838 North Tamiami Trail, with the Municipal Auditorium directly across US 41. It is not there now. The corner sold in 2018, the company left in 2020, and Sarasota's oldest performing arts organization spent six years without a permanent home.

I ushered in that building when I was in high school. Years later I took my own children to performances in the same room. Danielle Gladding has been a licensed Florida Realtor since 1981 and a broker since 1987, and runs Danielle Gladding & Co. Realty with her daughter Alison Kanter.

The corner

If you know the block, you know exactly the one. Ninth Street runs between the Trail and Coconut Avenue, a short walk north of the main downtown core. The Municipal Auditorium sits across 41. Today the site is part of the bayfront's long redevelopment; for most of the twentieth century it was where Sarasota went to see a play.

The Sarasota Players is the city's first performing arts organization and the second oldest in Florida. It grew out of a conversation between Fanneal Harrison and Catherine Gavin, who ran the Out-of-Door School and were looking for something their faculty would find interesting. Theater came top of the list. The first subscribers numbered in the low hundreds and paid two dollars each.

The first building, and a date worth being careful about

The company's first permanent home on that corner was built of native pecky cypress — 246 seats, a fireplace in the lobby, a deep stage, a full lighting system.

The year it opened is genuinely disputed, including by the organization itself. The Sarasota Players' own website says 1929. Their own filing with the IRS says the first permanent home was built of native pecky cypress in 1936, and the Longboat Observer, profiling the building's architect Ralph Twitchell, also gives 1936. Their website says the company has existed since 1929; the same federal filing says it began in 1930.

Those are the organization's own sources contradicting each other, so this is written without picking a side. Sarasota County Historical Resources holds the photographic archive and can settle it for anyone who needs the year in print.

One detail does lean the argument. The company is currently promoting its 97th season. Counting back, a 97th season in 2026 puts the first one in 1930 — which matches the federal filing rather than the website.

What is not disputed is who stood on that stage. Montgomery Clift made his acting debut there during the 1932–33 season. A teenage Jayne Meadows performed there before she was famous. Bette Davis and Charlton Heston are on the list too.

The building I knew

The pecky cypress house came down and a larger theater went up in its place on the same corner. According to The Players' own IRS filing, the replacement opened in January 1974 with 497 seats.

That is the room I remember. There was no fireplace. You came in and there was a bar on the right and a bar on the left, and the theater sat behind the lobby, and it was large. I ushered there in high school, a few years after it opened.

The detail that matters is not the ushering. It is that the same room was still there when my children were old enough to sit through a performance, and I took them. One building, one corner, from my teens until it was gone. That is a longer continuity than most American cities manage with any building, let alone a theater.

What happened to it

The Players sold the corner in 2018 and leased it back, finally vacating in October 2020 in the middle of the pandemic closures. The plan at the time was to build a large new complex at Waterside Place in Lakewood Ranch.

That plan did not happen. Fundraising ran into the pandemic, construction costs rose, and the agreement with the developer was terminated. What followed was six years of looking. The company performed in various indoor and outdoor venues, then in December 2021 opened a 140-seat theater in converted retail space at The Crossings at Siesta Key, with the stated aim of getting back downtown.

It floated taking over and renovating the Municipal Auditorium — the building across 41 from where it started. That responsibility went to the Bay Park Conservancy instead.

Payne Park, and where it actually stands today

On 18 October 2024 the Sarasota City Commission unanimously approved a thirty-year lease, in three ten-year segments at a nominal nonprofit rate, for The Players to renovate and occupy the city-owned Payne Park Auditorium.

The plan is an adaptive reuse of the existing 1960s building: a 200-seat performance venue, a new lobby, expanded restrooms, acoustical improvements, keeping the mid-century character. Fleischman Garcia Maslowski Architecture is leading the design. The estimated cost is roughly two and a half million dollars. Around 250 parking spaces sit close by.

Their own campaign page sets out the scope more specifically than the coverage does: seating, lighting and electrical, flooring, lobby modernization, accessibility, acoustics and safety updates. It is framed explicitly as practical rather than decorative — the page says the work is not about luxury upgrades.

The fundraising is structured as something they call the Payne Park Sprint: 180 days, no campaign overhead, every dollar to approved renovation expenses, held in a designated account and released only against those expenses, with monthly progress reports promised publicly. Whatever one thinks of capital campaigns generally, that is an unusually specific set of commitments to put in writing.

It is not open. As of September 2026 it is a construction site. Renovation work began in February 2026, with completion anticipated mid to late 2026, though the organization has not published a firm opening date. Until then performances continue at The Crossings at Siesta Key on South Tamiami Trail, while the studio and offices sit at 1400 Boulevard of the Arts — a few hundred yards from where the company started, and on the street now being rebuilt around The Quay.

Several things were tried and abandoned along the way, and the record is worth stating plainly rather than glossing:

A proposal to attach a new two-story structure of more than seventeen thousand square feet — roughly tripling the building — was withdrawn in December 2023 after community opposition, and abandoned when it became clear the City Commission would not permit expansion inside Payne Park
The subsidiary formed to build and operate that expansion, The Stage at Payne Park, has been dissolved
The idea of a separate performance hall on city land along South Washington Boulevard remains open in the lease but has not moved
The organization renamed itself from The Players Centre for the Performing Arts to simply The Sarasota Players
In December 2025 a reconstituted board parted ways with the chief executive who had led the search for five years

The lease is written to terminate if The Players obtains or builds another building elsewhere. It is a home, and it is also a step.

Why any of this matters if you are buying downtown

Two reasons, and neither is sentimental.

The first is that arts institutions move, and when they move they take foot traffic with them. A block that had a theater on it for eighty years behaves differently from one that never did, and it behaves differently again once the theater leaves. The stretch of bayfront around Boulevard of the Arts and The Quay is being rebuilt around exactly that question right now.

The second is Payne Park itself. It is a large public park at the eastern edge of downtown, and adding a working theater to it changes what that side of downtown is for. If you are looking at Laurel Park or the streets around it, that is a nearer amenity than anything on the bayfront. Our guide to buying a historic home downtown covers what those blocks ask of an owner.

And a practical note for anyone moving here: the cultural calendar is seasonal. A great deal of what makes this town feel busy runs roughly November through May. Someone who visits in February and moves in June sees two different places. That is worth knowing before you choose a neighborhood, not after.

Go deeper

Downtown Sarasota — how the districts fit together
Marina Jack and the bayfront — the ground the city made, a few blocks south
The Flower Streets — how the streets west of the Trail got their names
Lido Shores — where the Sarasota School of Architecture is thickest on the ground

A note on sources

Building dates here come from The Sarasota Players' own website and its federal filings, from the Longboat Observer and Sarasota Herald-Tribune, and from the City of Sarasota lease record. Where those sources disagree — and on the first building's year, they do — that is said rather than resolved. Anyone needing a settled date should contact Sarasota County Historical Resources, which holds the archive.

Danielle Gladding came to Sarasota in 1976 and has lived downtown, on Bird Key, on Lido Key, on St. Armands, in Harbor Acres, in Avondale and on Golden Gate Point. She has been a licensed Florida Realtor since 1981 and a broker since 1987, and runs Danielle Gladding & Co. Realty with her daughter and Sales Partner Alison Kanter. She can be reached at (941) 539-8535, and Alison Kanter at (941) 306-9786, or through the contact page.