Five things to Improve Downtown Sarasota

Joe Moraca asked for five things we'd like to see happen downtown.  I'm posting mine here:

1) Water taxi to South Lido so people who live downtown could get to the beach without either a car or a bike ride.

2) A regularly updated (tabloid format?) downtown map that used color coding to identify most of the major retail themes, which I would list as Restaurants, Galleries, Antique/Resale, Bookstores. This would be sponsored by advertisers and help downtown retail business.

3) A more flexible Saturday Farmer's Market format that would let four people share one space so that each was only there one weekend a month

4) Greening of walls with creeping fig (Ficus pumila). See Bay Plaza, the west wall of Sarasota News and Books and a previous blog of mine from January 7th. 

5) Inexorable, but not necessarily immediate, conversion of most non-retail ground floor space on Main Street to retail. 

Oh, and 6) general recanting of the decision to banish the Rosemary Community Garden.