Village of the Arts in Manatee County, Florida

Photograph: 12th Street and 12th Avenue (Bradenton, Florida).jpg by Visitor7 · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Restored from the credited Wikimedia Commons file, normalized to the consistent attraction-card frame and converted to WebP by 1stFlorida.com. Portrait originals retain their complete composition over a softly blurred extension of the same photograph.

Manatee County attraction

Village of the Arts

Manatee County · Gulf Coast

Thirty-six acres of small 1920s houses south of downtown Bradenton, turned into a working artists' neighborhood.

ABOUT THIS PLACE

The area had gone downhill badly. Bradenton General Hospital occupied part of it from 1937, and when that went the blocks around were left with a stock of cheap old cottages and not much else. The way back was a change in the city rules: artists were given permission to live and work in the same building, which is not normally allowed in a residential zone, and that single decision brought people in who could not have afforded a separate studio. There are now more than two hundred houses, galleries, restaurants, workshops and studios in it, some of the buildings around a century old, most of them restored and painted in strong colors and pastels so the streets themselves are part of the display. The trades practiced here include goldsmithing, stained glass, oil painting, pottery, photography, metalwork and jewelry, and many of the artists take commissions. People live here as well as work here, so it is a neighborhood first and an attraction second

GETTING THERE

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