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The following will appear in tomorrow’s edition of CL:

By Joel Rozen.

To some, the peach-colored building on 1721 Siesta Drive is just a dilapidated nuisance in the way of modern development. To others? Buried treasure.
“People are always stopping by and telling us stories about this place,” says Jesse White, watching his two colleagues rip the Mediterranean-style complex apart at the floorboards. “‘Oh, this used to be so-and-so’s house,’ or ‘I heard this happened in the ’30s.’ That sort of thing.” Rumor has it, he says, the building once housed John Ringling’s circus sideshow guests when they came to perform.
White is not your average demolition engineer. He’s a preservationist and “lover of old houses” who has spent years rescuing relics and antique wood from buildings on the verge of destruction. He sells many of his finds at his Rosemary District shop, Sarasota Architectural Salvage.
“It’s dirty, nasty work,” says burly co-worker Joe Newman, taking a crowbar to one of the apartment’s pesky cypress walls, “but it’s fun.” Yesterday, he found a 1916 wheat penny under pinewood floors on the second floor.
Fun work, but depressing as well. “Buildings like this are coming down at an alarming rate,” White says. He and other members of the Alliance for Historic Preservation have struggled for years to get a stronger conservation presence into the city’s zoning code.
And last Monday, they got finally got city staff at the Historic Preservation Board in their corner. Their proposal, a text amendment, aims for compromise between developers and those who want to see historic buildings better protected.
“This amendment gives us teeth,” says Joyce Waterbury, a preservationist on the Alliance’s board of directors who helped push the proposal.
While developers now operate by rules of “voluntary compliance” — they have the legal right to demolish without consulting the city’s Historic Preservation Board — the amendment would require negotiations with the board before anything is done to the property.
On the surface, that may seem like a minor change — after all, historic buildings can still be demolished under the amendment. But allowing preservationists a seat at the table certainly counts as progress. “This ensures that there will at least be a dialogue,” says Lorrie Muldowney, a local preservationist and a member of the city’s Historic Preservation Board. According to Muldowney, approximately 30 structures of varying historical signifigance are now up for demoltion in Sarasota. “It seems like a good time to start mobilizing,” she says.
From here, the revision will have to meet the commissioners’ approval, which may not happen until sometime in late May 2008, when they start reviewing the 63 amendments currently on the table.
Members of the Alliance are willing to wait. Still, most are unsure why it’s taken so long to get the initiative this far.
White blames “inertia.”

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