The Bay: “One Park for All” in Sarasota
The Bay: “One Park for All” in Sarasota
Award of Merit
2023 APA Florida Project Awards - Implementation
About this project
Magnificent sunsets, expansive bay views, and rich layers of history grace the 53-acre, publicly-owned land in Sarasota. Prior to planning and implementation, this site lacked identity, was inaccessible, and provided no ecological benefits. A community-driven effort to reclaim this critical gateway began with community visioning and master planning, work overseen by the Sarasota Bayfront Planning Organization (SBPO) and its design team.
Community engagement was the backbone of the master planning process. A series of community-driven principles, established through sincere dialogue and trust-building, guided the planning effort. The broad and inclusive outreach process included open houses, online engagement, focus groups, site tours, community forums, and youth and young professional charrettes. These tactics sought sincere exchange with the site’s constituents, who included active site users, unaware non-users, and traditionally under-represented community voices.
The resulting vision gives physical form to the community’s dreams, setting a resilient course for the site for future generations. The process launched in 2017 and concluded with unanimous City Commission approval in September 2018. SBPO transformed into the Sarasota BayPark Conservancy and a first phase of design and construction began transforming the site into a signature waterfront park now known as The Bay.
A Community-Driven Master Plan Becomes a Community-Loved Place
In October 2022, The Bay opened as the City’s first signature waterfront park, a 10-acre gateway to the expansive Sarasota Bay. Conceived as an experimental testing ground and constructed as an active, sustainable gathering place for Sarasota’s diverse community, the park is a model of environmental stewardship, the highly-anticipated realization of a community-driven vision, and a well-crafted expression of Sarasota’s heritage. The Bay is now a legacy destination, and will be for generations to come.
Extensive community input and the community-driven principles provided the design team with a robust assessment of needs, aspirations, and goals that served as touch points throughout every phase of the project. To meet a wide array of needs, the design provides a framework of both flexible and fixed spaces, including a recreational mangrove walk, a shade structure and concessions pavilion, an events and performance lawn, a beach and living shoreline, a signature play structure, and an intimate performance green. Multi-modal paths allow for discovery and adventure, while introducing visitors to more intimate, nature-immersed places of respite.
A Green and Blue Oasis
Every feature of The Bay is designed with a sensitivity to environmental processes and sustainability. The design team transformed the pre-construction condition, a relentlessly impervious parking lot, into an ecological oasis. Early inventory and analysis determined baseline metrics against which improvements could be measured and impact goals established and exceeded.
The realized design delivers innovation across various site systems. The rain gardens, denitrification trenches, and large-scale infrastructure capture, hold, and treat water locally, and also work together to treat over 70 million gallons of stormwater that passes through this site annually. The team protected, moved, or otherwise enhanced dozens of large trees on the site, providing continuity and nourishing a sense of place; extensive native plantings and ecological restoration expand their impact.