- January 21, 2026
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Pat Lundy sits on her lanai overlooking the Gulf, using a palette knife to paint a bouquet of white hydrangeas.
Trying to get the color just right, she scoops up a sliver of green on her palette and melds it in with the white.
She never thought she’d be a painter, but when she took a class at Selby Gardens about 20 years ago, a new world opened to her.
“It’s so relaxing,” she said. “I think it’s good therapy for people.”
She fell in love with painting and found a community of artists at the now-defunct Longboat Key Center for the Arts. Painting together builds community and allows artists to share ideas. “You learn from one another,” Lundy said.
The arts center closed in 2017, and Lundy’s friends have since come up with creative solutions for where to meet and paint together.
“We meet in this lady’s garage,” Lundy said. “She sets up these tables and has to move her cars out, so it’s not ideal.”
But there’s potentially good news for creatives and others on the north end who hope for a place to gather. After years searching for a suitable location for a north-end community center, a potential space is in the crosshairs of Manatee County, the town and Longboat North (a group of condo and homeowner associations on the north end of the island who have been advocating for a new community gathering space).
Longboat Island Chapel, which recently became home to the Longboat Key Paradise Center for Healthy Living, is being discussed as hosting space that can be utilized as a community center. The Paradise Center already offers yoga, tai chi, bingo and other events for the community Monday through Friday, and Longboat North co-chair Maureen Merrigan said the church and the nonprofit are open to the possibility of using the space as a north-end community center.
“The Paradise Center was open to expanding their offerings and helping to manage it, and the town staff worked with the county, and the county embraced the idea and said they were committed to helping us in the short term,” Merrigan said. “So our understanding is they are all working together with a good draft interlocal agreement.”
Finding potential space has been a long-term effort with many potential landing spots identified but never finalized. But now, Merrigan said, it seems as if the stars are aligned.
“Longboat Key is just one of those remarkable communities where those three things can come together. You have three groups that are trying to work together,” Merrigan said. “We’re blessed to be on a Key where people really try to see what can happen as opposed to what can’t happen.”
Longboat North created a committee, the North End Space Team, with the one goal of finding and securing space for a community center on the north end, and Manatee County Commissioners have signaled support for it. Merrigan said residents on the north end of the island have a desire for classes, recreation space and a place where residents can simply gather for informal meetings. Art classes are very much on the wish list.
“There’s a number of communities on the north end of the key that don’t have clubhouse facilities, so for them to do a small board meeting of eight people or a large social event of 20-100 people, it becomes very weather-dependent and whose house is open and doesn’t have guests in it. So I think one would be that use,” Merrigan said. “The second use would be to continue to expand what the Paradise Center does from a recreation standpoint. They’d been geared in the past toward an older clientele. The north end of the key, I think, has a younger demographic, and so I think opening some of these rec classes and doing things that meet those needs would be beneficial.”
Manatee County Commissioner Tal Siddique said potential uses for the space are still being ironed out.
“Once conversations with our staff, Longboat Key staff, Chapel and the residents continue, I think we’ll get a better picture of what we can actually accommodate,” he said.
The county is considering investing to improve the space. The price would be substantially less than if a community center were built from scratch.
Using existing space is also a more timely solution.
“The reality is a long-term buildout, buying land on Longboat Key and building it out, is a 10-year process,” Merrigan said. “I was joking that half of us will be dead by the time that’s done.”
While nothing is official, Siddique said he thinks using Longboat Island Chapel as a county community center “has a high likelihood of moving forward.”
The questions remaining are what will be offered at the center, how responsibility for running the community center would be split and what investments need to be made and in what amounts.
“It’s likely to be hundreds of thousands of dollars potentially,” Siddique said. “Originally we were talking about a few million dollars for a property purchase. We’re not going to make that, so I’m not exactly sure what staff will come up with, but I suspect it would ideally be under $200,000 or $150,000.”
Specifics would be revealed in an interlocal agreement on which the county and town commissions would both have to agree.
“I believe it’s a two- or three-year agreement we are talking about, but time will tell what it actually looks like,” Siddique said. “I think at least two years would be best because it would offer some level of stability for that area.”
Another unknown is whether the partnership would be permanent or a short-term stopgap. That could become more clear when and if the partnership moves forward. Merrigan and Siddique both said the chapel could become a long-term home for the community center if it’s a success.
“I think those are all wonderful things we’ll figure out in terms of partnerships over the next two to three years, including what the chapel can accommodate or not,” Merrigan said. “We just have a fabulous opportunity ahead of us to really experiment, see what works, what kind of classes work, what the community embraces, what the needs are and who can all work together.”
