An Unlikely Heroine Steps in to Save Crumbling Dolphin Tower

Ten years ago a Sarasota condo tower began to show serious signs of potential collapse.

By the time you’re reading this, Charlotte Ryan, a retired psychotherapist from New Jersey, will have accomplished what Sisyphus never did. She’ll have pushed her great rock to the very top of the mountain and crawled out from under her burden at last.

The petite, smartly dressed Ryan will have taken the elevator up to her 10th-floor downtown bayfront condo in Sarasota’s Dolphin Tower, let herself in and locked the door behind her. For the first time in five years, she will not have been wearing a protective hard hat.

It will have been quiet in her two-bedroom, two-bath condo, no workmen tramping through her rooms, no noisy hammering and whining construction machinery, no calls from lawyers and reporters. She’ll have reflected on the heartbreak and losses of Dolphin Tower owners who could not complete the journey with her and remembered the engineers, investors, laborers, families and city officials who followed her stubborn lead for years. And, she has predicted, she will have looked out at the sailboats in the harbor by Marina Jack, at the azure view of the bay—perhaps the very best in the city—she fought so hard to see once again, and taken a long, deep breath. Then she’ll have started to cry.

“It will be some kind of awesome feeling,” Ryan said in June, soon after the end of the building’s repair work. “It will be a feeling of, ‘How did I do this?’”

https://www.sarasotamagazine.com/home-and-real-estate/2015/10/an-unlikely-heroine-steps-in-to-save-crumbling-dolphin-tower

This story is now a few years old, but I think it points out issues that many Florida condo owners -- especially those close to the water -- will need to confront in the near future.