Circus Capital of the World

On Christmas Day, nineteen twenty-seven, John Ringling opened the doors of his brand new winter quarters for Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey, and Sarasota became something it had never been before: a circus town. The winter quarters were enormous, spanning the area just north of here, and from December through March every year, this city shared its streets and restaurants and neighborhoods with the strangest and most remarkable community of performers in the world.

Trapeze artists practiced their catches in the winter air. Lion tamers worked their routines in open-sided training barns. Elephants were walked down what are now residential streets, their keepers guiding them past the houses of year-round residents who treated the sight as entirely ordinary. Clowns in street clothes stopped at Sarasota lunch counters and argued about the price of eggs. The circus community bought houses here, sent children to local schools, attended local churches. By nineteen forty, the winter quarters were drawing one hundred thousand visitors a season, making the site one of Florida's first major tourist attractions.

In nineteen forty-eight, Ringling unveiled the Museum of the American Circus, the first institution in the world dedicated entirely to circus history and art. The collection grew to include parade wagons, costumes, posters, scale models of elaborate tent cities, and documentation of the performers who had passed through Sarasota over the decades. The Ringling Circus Museum remains one of the most extraordinary specialized collections in the United States.

The circus left Sarasota for good in nineteen fifty-nine, when changing economics and a transformed entertainment industry made the old winter quarters impractical. But the Ringling campus remained, and the name stuck. Sarasota still calls itself the Circus Capital of the World, a title earned one Christmas morning in nineteen twenty-seven when elephants lumbered off railcars into the Florida sun.