Drive north on Gulf of Mexico Drive past Broadway Street and you will pass a glass office building that has been empty for so long most people on the island have stopped noticing it. Peer through the doors and you will find a disco ball propped against the entrance, a stray leaf blower, a printer, and boxes scattered across a lobby built for a business that left nearly two decades ago. Next door, Whitney's is packed with people eating corn ribs by a firepit.
That contrast is not an accident of timing. It is the entire history of that corner, and it is about to become official policy.
On Tuesday, September 15, the Longboat Key Planning and Zoning Board takes up a two-part application that would let Whitney's demolish the vacant building next to it and use the land to nearly triple its seating. The hearing starts at 9:15 a.m. at Town Hall, 501 Bay Isles Road, and Town planning staff is recommending approval. If you eat at Whitney's, walk your dog past it, or have simply wondered for years what that empty glass box was for, the story of how it got here explains more about the north end than any listing description ever could.
A Bank, a Nonprofit, a Convicted Fraudster, and Then Nothing
The building at 6960 Gulf of Mexico Drive was built in 1976 as a bank. That much is unremarkable. What happened to it afterward is not.
Local realtor Andrew Vac bought the building in 2004 for $775,000 and leased it to the Longboat Key Chamber of Commerce, which shared the space with the Historical Society. Former Chamber president Gail Loefgren remembers a corner office, a teller's desk repurposed to greet tourists, and monthly breakfasts in what had been the bank's open floor. The Chamber was the building's last real tenant. When it moved out, the space sat empty starting in 2008.
Then it got stranger. In 2010, Aubrey Lee Price, a Georgia pastor turned financial adviser, bought the building for $533,900 with the stated plan of turning it back into a bank. Price never got the chance. He was later convicted of bank, wire, and securities fraud that cost more than 100 investors upward of $70 million, according to a 2014 FBI release, and is now serving 30 years in federal prison. Anthony Marterie bought the building in 2015 for $549,000. It has not had a tenant since.
Somewhere in the middle of that stretch, in 2016, a separate proposal tried to fold this same corner into something bigger: a 120-room hotel called the North End Hotel & Beach Club, combining the bank building, the old gas station next door, and adjoining land. Longboat Key voters rejected the rezoning at the ballot box, with 78 percent voting no, as Business Observer's history of the building lays out.
Bank, nonprofit office, fraud case, failed hotel. Four different uses, four different endings, one common thread: none of them served people walking in off the street looking for a meal or a drink. The building has been trying and failing to be something else for fifty years.
The One Thing That Did Work Was Right Next Door
While the bank building sat empty, the abandoned Chevron station next door became the exception that proves the rule.
James Brearley, David Benstock, Jose Chichande, and Joseph Chillura bought that gas station property in the fall of 2018 and spent the next year and a half turning it into Whitney's, working with Brooklyn design firm Studio Tack and local architect Robert Rokop. They kept the roll-up service bay doors. They kept the canopy's footprint, even after rebuilding it. Chichande, who grew up on Longboat Key, put it simply when Whitney's opened in January 2020: they kept the soul of the gas station and turned it into a restaurant.
It worked immediately, and it worked within limits nobody questioned at the time. Under the parking code in place when Whitney's was originally permitted, the restaurant was capped at 70 seats. That number mattered less because Whitney's success was never really about seat count. It was about being the kind of business that fit the north end.
Gail Loefgren, watching all of this from the Chamber's old vantage point in the now-empty bank, drew the connection directly in a recent conversation with Business Observer. Whitney Plaza, she said, is probably the best example of businesses on the north end, because most of them serve people rather than function as office space. The office space, she added, has migrated to the center of the island.
That is not a stray observation. It is a description of exactly what has happened to this one block over fifty years, restated as a general rule.
What's Actually Being Proposed on Tuesday
The application in front of the Planning and Zoning Board asks the Town to change both the future land use designation and the zoning on the bank parcel, so that it can function as one property with Whitney's next door. Whitney LBK LLC, the entity that owns and operates the restaurant, closed on the bank building on November 19, 2025, paying $1.2 million to Anthony J. and Roxanne Marterie, individually and as trustees of the Marterie Family Trust.
The plan calls for demolishing the 5,400-square-foot bank building and replacing it with roughly 2,900 square feet of new outdoor dining, shaded by a white pergola and integrated with tropical landscaping and pervious pavers, plus new interior space for a commissary kitchen, storage, cooler space, and restrooms. All food and drink preparation stays inside the existing restaurant building. The furniture outside would be portable, the lighting minimal, and there would be no new signage for the dining area itself.
Combined, the interior and outdoor space works out to roughly 7,650 square feet, which under the Town's current parking formula of one space per 150 square feet requires 51 parking spaces across the joined properties. That math is what gets Whitney's to somewhere around 200 total seats, though one version of the application materials puts the number at 225, a discrepancy the board may want to pin down before voting.
Either way, the comparison to that original 70-seat cap is the number that matters here. This is not a modest patio addition. It is close to triple the size Whitney's was permitted for when it opened six years ago, built on the same lot where a bank, a nonprofit, and a fraud case all failed to hold a tenant.
The application itself makes the pitch directly, pointing to Mar Vista and The Shore as proof that outdoor dining on Longboat Key can become the kind of destination this project is aiming for.
Why This One Skips the Ballot Box
The 2016 hotel proposal for this same stretch needed a voter referendum and lost. The Whitney's expansion does not need one, and the reason is written into the zoning math rather than the politics.
Both the current Office-Institutional designation and the proposed Highway-Oriented Commercial designation carry zero residential density under the Town's 1984 Comprehensive Plan. Because neither the land use change nor the rezone adds density, the applications do not trigger Longboat Key's referendum requirement. The rezone would move the parcel to C-3, the same commercial zoning Whitney's already holds next door, according to Longboat Key News's reporting on the hearing agenda.
That is the quiet mechanical difference between a hotel proposal in 2016 and a restaurant expansion in 2026: one asked voters to approve new density on the north end, and the other asks the Town to let an existing use spread onto an adjacent lot that already sits empty. The Planning and Zoning Board vote on Tuesday will not be the final word either way. Whatever it recommends heads to the Town Commission, which holds a single adoption hearing on the comprehensive plan amendment before transmitting it to FloridaCommerce and the Tampa Bay Regional Planning Council as notice only. Affected parties then have 30 days to challenge it, and if nobody does, it becomes effective 31 days after adoption. The separate rezoning ordinance requires two readings before the Commission and cannot move until the comprehensive plan amendment clears first, with the paperwork anticipating a second reading sometime in 2027.
What the Building's Failures Were Actually Telling Everyone
Whitney's opening in 2020 already told a version of this story. A gas station that had been an eyesore for years became one of the busiest spots on the north end within its first season. The bank building next door was the same corner, the same traffic, the same proximity to Whitney Beach across the street, and it has not held a single tenant since 2008.
The pattern was never really about the buildings. It was about what this stretch of Gulf of Mexico Drive, a short walk from Harry's Continental Kitchens and Euphemia Haye, has always rewarded: a place where people can walk in off the beach, not a place where people walk in to open an account. Tuesday's hearing is the Town formally recognizing that the corner already decided what it wants to be.
If you live on the north end and have been driving past that glass building wondering when someone would finally do something with it, now you know what, and roughly why it took this long.
For more on what's changing across Longboat Key's neighborhoods, from the Village to the south end, The Koy Group keeps a close eye on the stories that shape daily life here, not just the ones that show up in a listing.