Newtown, the Neighborhood That Built Sarasota

Every city in the Jim Crow South depended on a Black neighborhood it pretended not to need, and Sarasota was no different. Newtown, platted in nineteen fourteen north of downtown, was where the workers who built the Ringling estate, staffed the hotels, cooked the meals, and maintained the winter quarters lived when the day was done. What grew there over the following decades was not just a labor pool. It was a complete city within a city.

By the nineteen twenties and thirties, Newtown had its own lawyers, doctors, teachers, pharmacists, grocery stores, social clubs, and many Black churches. Neil Humphrey's pharmacy anchored the main commercial strip. The neighborhood produced its own professional class entirely because that class was excluded from the institutions serving white Sarasota. Newtown's residents did not have access to the same schools, hospitals, libraries, or beaches. They built their own.

Just south of Newtown lay Overtown, the first African American enclave in Sarasota, which grew up even earlier. Urban renewal in the mid-twentieth century demolished much of Overtown and displaced its residents. The area was later renamed the Rosemary District, erasing the original name but not the history. Today the Rosemary District is one of Sarasota's most rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods.

Newtown itself survives with its identity largely intact. The Newtown African American Heritage Trail, marked by historic plaques, traces the neighborhood from its nineteen fourteen platting through desegregation and into the present. The Newtown Alive organization maintains the trail and has worked to document the stories of the residents whose labor and resilience built a city that rarely acknowledged them by name.