Written by Boca Beacon Reader on . Posted in Letters to the Editor.
To the Editor: Sarasota Opera’s annual Food & Wine Festival returns on September 23 from 1 to 4 p.m. and will take place at Sarasota Opera House. Local restaurants will gather to serve tasty bites, wine and other treats as a benefit for Sarasota Youth Opera. This year’s festival will feature many returning classics, such […]
Written by Garland Pollard on . Posted in Community.
Rental inventory in Boca Grande and on other nearby islands, like Palm Island, is gradually coming back on line, almost a year after the storm.
“We feel kind of lucky compared to our neighbors to the south,” said Robin Madden, an owner/broker at Islander Properties, a leasing firm for properties on Palm Island. She represents individual houses there, and not the resort, which is a separate operation.
This summer, for instance, Lee Board of County Commissioners voted to waive tolls on the Sanibel Causeway for six consecutive Sundays to support a “Savor the Shore” campaign organized by the Lee County Visitor & Convention Bureau.
Written by Staff Report on . Posted in Community.
The Englewood Area Board of Realtors’ recent sales report for Boca Grande and the Cape Haze Peninsula, issued Monday, Aug. 14, shows that a 1,464 square-foot home on Waterways Avenue took the top price of the week at just over $4.2 million. The house was on the market for 67 days and was paid for in cash on August 8, through Gulf-to-Bay Sotheby’s International, Agent Maryjo Pigott.
Other sales include the following:
Written by Staff Report on . Posted in Community.
Written by Sheila Evans on . Posted in Education, Profiles.
The Island School has not only found an art teacher with pizazz, they found one with a sense of humor and a sense of purpose. The new art teacher is Terry Hoffman, and she loves bringing out the artistic creativity she believes is present in everyone, especially children.
Monday, Aug. 14 was her first day with her new students. “It was a great first day!” she reported.
The bright orange sundress she wore was a great ice- breaker, as children noticed the drawings of pineapples on the dress. “I love pineapples,” one student told her. “I break out when I eat pineapple,” another offered. Everyone had something to say about the dress or the jewelry or the artwork … and Terry knew that is how it would work.
Written by Marcy Shortuse on . Posted in Community History, Editorial, Obituaries.
There’s so much that has changed in our community in the last year or two. It’s difficult sometimes to wrap our minds around what has happened just since last September, much less the other changes that have taken place. Some of them were fast and furious, like Hurricane Ian, but others have been a slow, […]
Written by Marcy Shortuse on . Posted in News.
Thursday morning got a little crazy over on Railroad Avenue, as demolition crews showed up to start on the old Bakery Building at the same time T. Steele Construction was there to work on the new cell phone tower site. Neither crew knew the other would be there, and apparently Aaron Diaz, owner of The Barnichol, didn’t know demo crews would be beginning today, either, and was concerned for the safety of his store patrons. The problem was exacerbated by the fact that the person charged with dealing with the bakery demolition was out of the country.
Written by Garland Pollard on . Posted in News.
In the wake of the recent explosive hearings in the U.S. Congress on UFOs, now called Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, the sole report of a 1999 UFO hovering near the causeway to Boca Grande still remains a mystery.
The report was from Dec. 18, 1999, when an unknown couple is alleged to have come onto the island and seen a “football-field-sized saucer with blinking white lights, that made no sound as it traveled across the sky.”
The report is one of over 8,000 sightings of mysterious things in the air over Florida, according to the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC).
Written by Guest Columnist on . Posted in Education, News.
As Florida’s coral reef experienced record-breaking heat waves starting in July, with temperatures in adjacent backreef areas reaching temperatures above 100°F, Mote Marine Laboratory immediately began an unprecedented evacuation of thousands of stressed and dying coral from its four offshore coral nurseries.
Written by Guest Columnist on . Posted in Community.
The Gasparilla Island Conservation and Improvement Association (GICIA) is pleased to announce that a Bike Path enhancement project began earlier this week. Each year summer maintenance and improvement projects are established for the five miles of the GICIA Bike Path. The focus this year is returning GICIA’s Bike Path property to pre-hurricane condition.
Hurricane Ian destroyed much of the island’s beautiful vegetation. It is estimated that approximately 300 trees and countless grasses and shrubs along the Bike Path were lost to the storm. This week crews began planting nearly 2,500 trees, shrubs and grasses to replace what was lost to Ian.