St. Armands Towers unit sells for $750,000

After turning in a strong 27 sales in the two preceding weeks on the keys, real-estate transactions in the final week of October fell to just five. Yet, over the past five months since June 1 through Oct. 30, we reported 281 sales, of which 55 were for $1 million or more.

The top sale for the last week of October was recorded at St. Armands Towers North on Lido Beach where Erin Pratt, of Brighton, Mich., sold the Unit 103 to David Baril, from Leicester, Mass., for $750,000.
The two-bedroom, two-bath condo at 1 Ben Franklin Drive was constructed in 1968 with 1,389 square feet of living space. Pratt bought the condo for $1.01 million in May 2006.

The Players Club III
The largest sale of the week on Longboat Key occurred at the 134-unit The Players Club III where Kit Konolige, of Greenwich, Conn., sold Unit 404 to Anthony Saggese Jr., of New Canaan, Conn., for $619,000.
The two-bedroom, three-bath apartment at 1445 Gulf of Mexico Drive was constructed in 1978 and has 1,679 square feet of living area. Konolige bought the condo for $825,000 in November 2007.

Sleepy Lagoon Park No. 2
Blandyna Nowak, of Glenview, Ill., sold the home at 738 Norton St. in the north Longboat Key Sleepy Lagoon Park No. 2 subdivision for $400,000 to Jeanne McFarland and Patricia Muller, of Portola Valley, Calif.

The two-bedroom, two-bath residence was constructed in 1967 with 1,291 square feet of living area. Nowak bought the property for $200,000 in February 1997.

Seaplace VI
Patricia and Richard Herring, of Mechanicsburg, Pa., bought Unit G8-204-C at Seaplace VI from Paul Mortell and his wife, Carole Strong-Mortell, of 1930 Harbourside Drive, for $305,000. The two-bedroom, two-bath apartment condo at 1925 Gulf of Mexico Drive was built in 1978 by Arvida and has 933 square feet of living area. The Mortells bought the condominium for $417,000 in June 2004.

Boathouse of LBK
There was one transaction at the 194-berth Boathouse of Longboat Key. Dennis DeWitt, from Louisville, Ky., bought berth 3143 from Yvonne and William Dyer, Sarasota, for $55,000.

Did you know?
Longboat Key’s first land link to the mainland was held up by the 1926 hurricane that swept through Miami at the end of the Florida boom, crossing Lake Okeechobee and into the Gulf, where it damaged construction on the first Longboat Pass bridge being built by Manatee County.

The 750-foot wooden trestle span, with a humpback over the navigable channel, was nearing completion in early October when the winds, rain and waves of the passing hurricane damaged the structure, which delayed its opening for weeks. The narrow vehicular bridge allowed access to the mainland over West View (today’s Coquina Beach) to the narrow wooden Cortez Bridge linking Cortez with Cortez Beach (Bradenton Beach) that was completed and opened in the spring of 1922.

Bridge washes out in 1932
The Longboat Pass span lasted less than six years; it was washed out in an unusual strong spring storm in March 1932. A storm surge near midnight literally lifted the wooden main span from its moorings and deposited it off the northwestern end of what became Jewfish Key.

Manatee County barged the humpback portion of the bridge to the Snead Island cutoff channel where it became the Snead Island humpback bridge until it was replaced with the present bridge to Snead Island by the Bradenton Yacht Club.