The Bank Building Next to Whitney's Sat Empty for Sixteen Years. Its Next Chapter Was Never Really in Doubt.

If you drive the north end of Gulf of Mexico Drive past Whitney's, you already know the glass building next door. Blinds drawn, a for-sale sign that seems to have grown roots, a parking lot that never fills. It has looked exactly like this for so long that most residents stopped asking why.

The building has an answer, and it is stranger than the empty windows suggest. It has been a bank, a chamber of commerce, a historical society archive, the property of a man who faked his own death, and one corner of a 120-room hotel proposal that Longboat Key voters killed at the ballot box. Now Whitney's, the restaurant next door, wants to tear it down and build a tropical dining garden in its place. The Town's Planning and Zoning Board already said yes.

What the building's history actually shows is less about one restaurant's expansion and more about what the north end of the Key has been trying to become for fifty years, and why the town keeps landing on the same answer.

Four Owners, One Address

The building at 6960 Gulf of Mexico Drive went up in 1976 as a bank. That lasted through the early 2000s, when local realtor Andrew Vac bought the property in 2004 for $775,000 and leased it to the Longboat Key Chamber of Commerce, which shared the space with the Historical Society. By 2008 the chamber had moved out, and the building has been effectively vacant ever since, apart from one strange interlude.

In 2010, Aubrey Lee Price bought the building for $533,900, saying he intended to reopen it as a bank. Price was a Georgia pastor turned financial adviser who was later found to have run a fraud scheme that cost more than 100 investors over $70 million, according to a 2014 federal announcement of his conviction. He faked his own death before he was eventually caught. When his assets were seized, the north end's largest office building went with them.

Anthony and Roxanne Marterie bought the property in 2015 for $549,000, individually and as trustees of the Marterie Family Trust. It sat empty under their ownership too, until they sold it to Whitney LBK LLC on November 19, 2025, for $1.2 million, according to Manatee County property records reported by the Business Observer. Whitney's had found its next-door neighbor a buyer at last.

The Referendum That Already Happened Here

Long before Whitney's ever filed paperwork, this same stretch of land, the gas station that later became Whitney's, the bank building, and the lots around them, was assembled by a developer with a much bigger idea. Floridays Development Co. pitched a 120-room hotel called the North End Hotel & Beach Club. It needed a rezoning that would have required a public vote under Longboat Key's charter, and residents said no. Seventy-eight percent voted against it.

That referendum matters here because it explains why the current proposal never went to a public vote at all. Longboat Key requires voter approval when a rezoning increases residential density. The hotel would have. Whitney's request does not. Both the current Office-Institutional designation and the Highway-Oriented Commercial designation it would become carry zero residential density under the town's 1984 Comprehensive Plan, so the comp plan amendment and rezone can move through Town Hall without going back to voters, according to reporting on the Sept. 15 Planning and Zoning meeting. The building was never going to become a hotel. It was always more likely to become something the town didn't have to put on a ballot.

What Whitney's Is Actually Asking For, and What It Isn't Yet

It helps to be precise about where this stands, because a Planning and Zoning recommendation is not a finished project.

• The board recommended approval of a comprehensive plan amendment and a rezone from Office-Institutional to Highway-Oriented Commercial, the same zoning Whitney's already carries.
• The rezone, formally Ordinance 2027-02, still needs two readings before the Town Commission, and cannot move forward until the comp plan amendment is approved first.
• Town staff's own filing anticipates the second reading landing sometime in 2027.
• Even after that, the actual construction layout, landscaping, and parking plan would need a separate hearing back before the Planning and Zoning Board.
• One detail worth knowing regardless of what gets built: the zoning change runs with the land, not with Whitney's. If the dining garden never materializes, the parcel could still be used for a bank or office, or for the broader menu of highway-commercial uses that C-3 zoning allows, according to the Sept. 18 Your Observer report on the vote.

Public reaction at the September 15 meeting leaned favorable. Eddie Abrams, a former board member and nearby property owner, told the board the vacant building is "an eyesore" and that something needs to be done with it. Vice Chair Jay Plager said the feedback he had heard from neighbors was overwhelmingly positive, with noise the only real concern raised.

The Design, If the Rest of the Process Clears

Assuming the later approvals go through, the plans call for roughly 2,900 square feet of new outdoor dining built into tropical landscaping and pervious pavers, shaded by a white pergola over open-air tables among palms. The application points to two existing Longboat Key restaurants, Mar Vista and The Shore, as evidence that outdoor dining spaces like this can become destinations in their own right rather than afterthoughts.

Seating would grow from Whitney's current 70 seats to roughly 200. A new 1,370-square-foot structure would house a commissary kitchen, storage, cooler space, and restrooms, with all food and drink preparation staying inside the existing building. The application specifies portable furniture, minimal lighting, and no new signage for the outdoor area, with last call on the patio set at 10 p.m.

It is worth remembering that Whitney's itself was once an abandoned Chevron gas station. The restaurant's own application leans on that history, arguing that the same kind of redevelopment that turned a blighted parcel into what it now calls a hospitality destination is exactly what the vacant bank building next door needs.

What the Corner Has Been Telling Us for a While

The pattern here is bigger than one address. At the Manatee-Sarasota county line, another empty office building, at Harbor Square, is being eyed for a similar conversion, with plans for a restaurant called the Buccaneer to take its place.

Someone who worked inside the bank building during its Chamber of Commerce years, identified in reporting as Loefgren, put it directly:

"Whitney Plaza is probably the best example of businesses on the north end, and most of them are businesses that serve people, not office space. I think the office space has migrated to the center of the island."

That is the through line. The north end tried a big institutional swing once, in the hotel proposal, and residents turned it down. It tried staying an office building for another decade and a half, and the market never returned. What has actually taken hold on this stretch of the key is smaller-scale hospitality, places built around a meal, a drink, a view of the water. Whitney's expansion is not a departure from that story. It is the next paragraph.

For anyone who has wondered what will finally happen to that empty glass building, the honest answer is that it was probably never going to become anything else.

If you are watching how a specific block of Longboat Key is changing because you are thinking about your own next move here, that is a conversation worth having with someone who tracks this market day to day. Jayne Del Medico has spent nearly two decades on this island. Let's Connect.