Joan Altabe's acid pen

By Times staff

© St. Petersburg Times, published May 31, 2001

Before she was laid off from the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, Joan Altabe wrote and filed this short piece attacking a new $130-million hotel-condominium tower being built on the Sarasota waterfront. The newspaper never ran it.

Critical brass Ruffled feathers were all in a day's work for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune's arts critic. A layoff stilled her acerbic pen, but controversy rages on.

I just spent a weekend in the Hyatt's 10th-floor suite -- two floors of beds, baths, televisions and panoramic views of boat slips in the inlet off Sarasota Bay.

Also in view: a behemothic mountain of masonry called the Ritz-Carlton.

Like a rampart for a fortress, full with swaggering turrets, the 400,000-square-foot Ritz exterior looms with cyclopean scale over the inlet, impeding the water view. Even though I was on a top floor of the Hyatt, I felt dwarfed, midgetized by the Ritz.

Are you getting this? Here's this world center for elegance and its dense slab of stone rises like a dirty cloud scumming the sky. I don't care how many 10-foot marble bars, wedding cake chandeliers and 20-foot-high foyers there may be in this place, most people have to look at this place from the outside, and it overwhelms, it disfigures, and is, in a strange way, sleazy.

No, not in the neon-coated sleazy way that the nearby Splash bathing suit store is, but sleazy nonetheless for its extravagant size, its flaunting roof line and its overall obtrusiveness.

Okay, U.S. 41 is not exactly a six-stool diner street, but can it be that we've become the kind of place where priciness calls attention to itself so shamelessly?

A March issue of the New Yorker describes a rising number of ostentatious homes on California's oceanfront as fortresses that Renaissance princes might own.

Not Renaissance princes. Their aesthetic was about balance, symmetry and proportion. The Ritz is so out of proportion, I find myself thinking fondly of the Radley Place in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, low with a deep front porch shaded by oak trees under rain-rotted shingles.

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