The different social scenes swirl around golf and tennis at the Longboat Key Club, or classes and lectures at the art and education centers, or the churches and the one synagogue. The biggest social event of the year is the St. Jude's luncheon in November; it's become a Welcome Back gala, and 800 to 1,000 residents turn out. Last year, it raised almost $30,000 for St. Jude Hospital in Memphis.

George Rauch, who moved to a wooded, bayfront property on the north end of the key with his wife, Sally, 31 years ago, says Longboat has been an idyllic place to live and to raise their three children. He remembers when there were only two high-rise condominiums along the Gulf, and an evening's entertainment would be walking across to the beach to build a bonfire and cook hot dogs and hamburgers with friends. Today's Longboat may be richer and more sophisticated, he says, but it's still an easygoing place where plenty of old-timers know each other and people are more "down to earth" and less "status-conscious" than in resort enclaves such as Palm Beach.

"Oh, my God, it's fabulous, we have everything out here," agrees gregarious Murf Klauber, who just celebrated his 35th anniversary as owner of The Colony Beach and Tennis Resort. "My new car is a year old and I have 1,100 miles on it."

Janet Walter, 33, marketing director at the Flanzer Jewish Community Center, who moved from the mainland to the north end of the key with her husband, Steve, three years ago, says life on Longboat is "awesome." They bought a home on a quiet street with canals on either side, where many of their neighbors are also young couples with children; and though they both work in Sarasota, Walter says the drive, with its expansive views of the Gulf, is so beautiful they don't mind the commute. Weekends, they kayak across the canal to visit neighbors, cruise around in their boat or meet friends for dinner at Mar Vista, a casual bayfront restaurant, or Pattigeorge's, a trendy mid-key place.

"I've never felt isolated," says Walter. When she was pregnant with her second daughter, she ran on the bike path along Gulf of Mexico Drive right up to her last week. One day in the Publix at Avenue of the Flowers, two Longboat policemen told her, "We know you! We've been watching to make sure you don't fall down."

But skyrocketing property values and a fundamental change in demographics are changing Longboat Key once again. A bastion of quiet affluence and Midwestern conservatism mixed with a sizeable contingent of Canadians in the '70s and early '80s, the population has steadily become artier, more urbane, more liberal and more drawn from the New York and the Northeast. Now it's also becoming richer-much richer, say island residents.

"We're seeing a lot of wealthy newcomers," Rauch says. "They come in on corporate jets-Dolphin Aviation is stacked with them." And as property values have risen, the comfortably well-off retirees who could once afford a nice home in Country Club Shores or the artists who could buy a funky little cottage in the Village can no longer pay the price of admission. A nondescript home in the Village now sells for more than $400,000; and Walter, who notes that she and her husband bought their home right before prices began to shoot up, says many young couples in their neighborhood do not work-presumably, they are "trust-fund babies," she says, with private incomes.

Along with soaring home prices have come soaring property taxes. Rauch says that many part-time residents (who do not qualify for Florida's homestead exemption tax break and the additional three-percent-per-year limit on property tax increases) can't pay their ever-escalating tax bills. "They're selling their property and moving to North Carolina," he says. How high are property taxes? Rauch has a friend who recently bought a Gulf-front Longboat home. "He's paying $76,000 a year [in property taxes] for a house on a 100-foot lot," he says.

Annette Rogers swings her shiny white Mercedes through the gates of the Longboat Key Club and turns north along Longboat Club Road. "We call this the Longboat Riviera," she says, gesturing toward the pearl-hued high-rise condominiums and $10-million-plus waterfront estates that extend north of the Resort at Longboat Key Club. ("Houses," she shrugs. "They look like hotels.") She points out L'Ambiance, where philanthropist Bea Friedman's penthouse apartment was snapped up for $5.8 million the day it went on the market last year; the Pierre; the Sanctuary; Longboat Key Towers, the original high-rise, where Gulf and bay view units sold for $50,000 in the 1970s, $450,000 six or seven years ago, and $750,000 today; and Regent Place, where the ninth-floor apartment she sold to a friend for $900,000 nine years ago recently sold for $3 million.