Caspersen Beach Park adds beautiful boardwalk ... and restrooms?

Last Friday, just for the heck of it, I went to a press conference and ribbon cutting for improvements at Caspersen Beach Park.
Gray day. Speechifying. The usual drill.
There is a beautiful new boardwalk, though, nestled in the palms and sea grapes that line the beach. And Caspersen now has the most beautiful beach restrooms I have ever seen.
“You mean the Taj Mahal?” joked Pam Johnson, a spokesman for the City of Venice.
This two-story structure, built to resist the storm surge of a hurricane, features a nifty ramp suspended from the ceiling. Gray metal columns, meant to mimic sea oats, line the sides of the building.

Click here to see a Caspersen Beach photo gallery.

Somehow, this modern building looks like it belongs at Caspersen Beach. Quite a trick.
The $2.2 million park project was designed by a Sarasota firm called TOTeMS Architecture, which raises an obvious question. Why would architects capable of such elegant work choose to give themselves such an inelegant name?
Typing that lowercase “e” in TOTeMS feels like stepping on a sand spur.

Horse and Chaise
John McCarthy, the former parks director for Sarasota County, spoke about the history of Venice and Caspersen Beach.
I learned at least one thing, which means it was a pretty good speech.
Venice was once known as Horse and Chaise. I had always assumed, foolishly, that this referred to an old livery stable or something.
McCarthy explained that sailers in the Gulf of Mexico once used two clumps of pine trees as a landmark near Venice. They imagined that the silhouette of these trees looked like someone traveling in a carriage.
Hence, Horse and Chaise.

Ribbons of Venice
Caspersen Beach improvements are just part of the big recreational picture in Venice.
Speakers from VABI -- Venice Area Beautification, Inc. -- showed how the beach park connects to the Venetian Waterway Park, which connects to the Legacy Trail, which runs all the way to Sarasota.
The next step will be links to Myakka River State Park and the Carlton Reserve east of I-75. The idea is that you’d be able to bike or skate all of the way, or most of the way, without braving the traffic of South County roads.
This overall plan is called the Ribbons of Venice.
The little picture at Caspersen Beach includes several details worth mentioning.
There’s not much shade at Caspersen, so the restroom stairs were designed to rise under the roof of the building. This provides a little shelter from the sun. Pretty cool.
Even cooler is an idea county parks workers had for the concrete floor at the entrance to the restrooms. They set marine fossils into the cement to create something like a shark-tooth terrazzo floor.
If that isn’t the perfect final touch for the world’s finest beach restrooms, then I don’t know what is.