Long before it was one of Sarasota's most sought-after addresses, Indian Beach/Sapphire Shores was where the city's first great fortunes chose to winter.
The neighborhood takes its name from the shell middens and ceremonial mounds left by the native peoples who fished the shoreline of this area for centuries. In the early twentieth century, railroad executive Ralph Caples, who settled on the bayfront early, persuaded his friends, brothers John and Charles Ringling, to see Sarasota for themselves. The Ringling brothers had made a fortune with their famed circus. In 1911, John and Mable Ringling bought their waterfront estate here, and Charles and Edith Ringling soon followed next door.
The circus fortune transformed the shoreline. Between 1924 and 1926, builder Owen Burns completed Ca' d'Zan, John and Mable's Venetian Gothic mansion on the bay. Charles began his own marble residence in 1924, now part of the New College campus. Together with the Caples estate, these homes form the Caples'-Ringlings' Estates Historic District, listed on the National Register in 1982.
The remarkable wealth and Ringling's penchant for European, especially Italian, style set the tone for the streets throughout the neighborhood. In 1925, at the height of the Florida land boom, Ringling and Caples developed the Sapphire Shores subdivision just south of their estates. Deed restrictions called for Spanish, Italian and Moorish designs, laid out along curving streets lined with Washingtonian palms. Many of those original homes still stand, alongside earlier cottages and more modest homes like our 1910 kit house on Charles Lane and the mid-century homes that followed.
A century later, the neighborhood still lives in the Ringlings' shadow in the best sense: the Museum of Art, Ca' d'Zan and the Historic Asolo Theater are a short walk away, and the bay remains the spectacular backdrop to notable estates. If you are drawn to a home and setting with provenance, I would love to show you this special enclave.
