The three-story, 65-room Bay Island Hotel on the north end of Siesta Key welcomed visitors from 1912—five years before the first bridge to the island—all the way up to the early 1950s. E.M. Arbogast, a West Virginian who’d first visited the area in 1906, built it. Sarasota Bay at the time was a fisherman’s paradise, as evidenced by these nattily dressed fellows posing behind their bounty of grouper and grunts. That’s developer Owen Burns, at one time Sarasota’s most prolific builder, standing at the rear to the right of the hotel sign.