Venice Depot

About this property

The Venice Seaboard Air Line Railway Station (also known as the Venice Depot) is a historic former Seaboard Air Line Railroad depot located at 303 East Venice Avenue in Venice, Florida. It is the southern trailhead of the Legacy Trail, which runs along the railroad's former right of way. It currently serves as a hub for bus service operated by Sarasota County Area Transit (SCAT). On August 17, 1989, it was added to the U.S. National Register of Historic Places. In the 1870s, Richard Roberts established a homestead near Roberts Bay. In 1884, he sold a portion of his holdings to Frank Higel. Higel established a citrus operation involving the production of several lines of canned citrus items, and for the next 30 years the Higel family members were boat builders, fishermen, grove caretakers and contractors. Darwin Curry was the first postmaster. The Higel and Curry families chose the name "Venice" for their community post office, located south of Shakett Creek on what is now Portia Street in the unincorporated community of Nokomis. The Seaboard Air Line (SAL) was the first railroad to expand its network into Sarasota County, Florida, extending tracks first to Sarasota in 1903 and Fruitville in 1905. The SAL extended their network into Venice in 1911, at the instigation of Mrs. Potter ("Bertha") Palmer, whose family had just purchased thousands of acres south of Fruitville and adjacent to the Venice area. The first depot in Venice was located originally at the junction of what is now Tampa and Nokomis Avenues. In 1925, Fred H. Albee purchased 2,916 acres (1,180 ha) of land from the Venice-Sarasota Company. Albee had previously developed Nokomis and built its first luxury hotel, known as the Pollyanna Inn. Albee asked John Nolen to design a city on his land, but Albee did not have a chance to implement his city plan before he was approached with a proposal from the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers (BLE) to purchase the land in October 1925. The purchase was motivated by a desire by the BLE to increase the union's assets and holdings in the area. The BLE Realty Corporation was organized to develop the area, and the Venice Company was created to market property. The company retained Nolen to complete a city plan in 1926. Nolen moved the SAL tracks eastward to the present location of the Venice depot. The new depot was designed by New York architectural firm of Walker & Gillette (still extant today under the name Swanke Hayden Connell Architects), who the BLE retained to design most of the new buildings they were planning for Venice. Walker & Gillette designed the depot in harmony with the other structures in Venice, adopting a Mediterranean Revival style then highly popular in Florida due to its warm climate and Spanish heritage. The spare, unornamented exterior yellow stucco surfaces, in combination with the simple arched and blocky volumes gently-sloping red tile roofs seen in the depot building are the hallmarks of this style. The structure of the building under the stucco used a hollow clay tile.

Location

Categories

Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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