Florida in 1964 - Sarasota, Cape Haze, St. Petersburg

Thornton Utz, a longtime illustrator for The Saturday Evening Post, created this pictorial map of Sarasota around 1964 after relocating to the city in the 1950s, working under sponsorship from the Sarasota Chamber of Commerce and, in this printing, First Federal Savings and Loan Association. Utz brought a magazine illustrator's narrative eye to the project rather than a cartographer's, rendering Sarasota in the same whimsical, story-driven style that had made his Post covers so recognizable. He published and copyrighted the map himself, offering autographed gift editions by mail order while local banks distributed sponsored copies free to residents and tourists, a distribution model built for wide circulation rather than archival preservation. The map captures Sarasota at the height of its postwar tourism boom, promoting the city's identity as Florida's mid-century resort capital just as commercial air travel and the interstate highway system were making the Gulf Coast newly accessible to northern visitors.

The map dots Sarasota's landscape with the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, the Asolo Theatre, the Circus Hall of Fame, Horn's Cars of Yesterday, and Sarasota Jungle Gardens, a set of attractions that together defined the city's tourist identity in the early 1960s. Vignettes of sail fishing, water skiing, and golf line the map's margins alongside a nod to the Chicago White Sox spring training grounds, capturing Sarasota's recreational appeal in the same breath as its cultural institutions. The newly founded New College and the Cape Haze Marine Laboratory also appear, signaling the city's growing reputation as an educational and scientific center alongside its resort economy, a detail that sets this map apart from purely tourist-focused Gulf Coast maps of the same era.

It's a lively gift for a Sarasota family, a Gulf Coast Florida transplant, or a collector of mid-century pictorial maps who appreciates the work of a well-known magazine illustrator applied to civic promotion rather than a national publication. Unlike the store's 19th-century Florida atlas maps from Gray and Rand McNally, this Utz map represents an entirely different genre nearly a century later - hand-illustrated, commercially sponsored, and built for a postwar tourist audience rather than a land buyer or traveler with an atlas. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.