PART ONE
Special Report by Skip Foster, Red Tape Florida
This is a story about 997 emails, a $150,000 sidewalk, an 8-eye-bolt bike rack and a parking lot that never got built.
The story includes specific instructions on a pollinator “water feature,” an order to build bookshelves into windows and a very, very expensive patch of grass.
But ultimately, it’s a story about what happens when a city government mistakes a beloved small business for a regulatory obstacle course.
This is The Amazing Adventure of Midtown Reader (and the Sidewalk of Doom).
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The City of Tallahassee almost broke Sally Bradshaw. Almost.
The founder and owner of Tallahassee bookstore Midtown Reader has turned it into a beloved Tallahassee institution.
But as the store bustled, it also busted at the seams. She needed additional inventory space and parking — the latter a chronic issue for Midtown merchants.
So, after Don Quarello decided to close the adjacent Waterworks after a long and iconic run and after no successor emerged to run the bar, she purchased the property
By August of 2024, Waterworks had been demolished and Sally was ready to go.
Then, the real adventure began. It was time to deal with the City of Tallahassee.
It took more than a year before the small expansion opened.
And the cost? Well, read on …
The city had some ideas
There were two main phases to the attempt to get the renovation complete.
As it turned out, the building permit was the easy part. It was the process of getting approval for what are called “deviations” that turned a modest 700-foot expansion into a novel more at home in the sci fi section of the bookstore than home improvement.
A deviation is a formal city approval allowing a property owner to deviate from a specific development standard — a waiver, essentially, from what the code requires.
There are plenty of rules in the City’s voluminous book of codes. But it was the ones NOT listed that city officials started dropping on Midtown Reader. At one point, city officials suggested the bookstore set aside space on its private property for food trucks.
Food trucks. For a bookstore.
Now, a pause.
One thing Red Tape Florida has discovered in its first year is that local government planning departments are all quite familiar with the state’s public records laws. It’s for that reason that most “suggestions” are delivered, you guessed it, verbally.
While email traffic can still be voluminous (more on that later) there are other things local government officials wouldn’t be caught dead putting in a public record.
Red Tape Florida has found that builders and contractors will often send an email with a question, but the reply will come by phone. Emails asking to confirm what was discussed go unanswered.
With that backdrop, let’s return to Midtown Reader.
The biggest city demand wasn’t about food trucks. It was about a sidewalk.
Remember the left turn lane controversy?
To understand this story, one has to remember what was happening in the news in Tallahassee. In early 2025, as the Midtown Reader project was gaining steam, opposition began to form over proposed changes to Thomasville Road in Midtown.
A Blueprint 2000 “placemaking” project would result in the road becoming one way for at least 2 years while the left turn lane was eliminated and utilities were upgraded. Among many Midtown merchants, Sally Bradshaw spoke publicly against the plan and its devastating impact on her business.
Oh, and one more change was a part of the Blueprint plan: The Thomasville Road sidewalks would be expanded from 5 feet wide to 6 feet wide on the east side of the street and 7 feet on the west side.
When sidewalks go sideways
In Midtown, about 3,000 feet of sidewalk line Thomasville Road on each side, from the intersection of 7th Avenue, south to Monroe Street. The 5-foot-wide stretch of sidewalk in front of Midtown Reader and the old Waterworks lot is only 150 feet long.
But for the City of Tallahassee to issue a building permit to Midtown Reader, it had some demands.
Namely this: Midtown Reader would be required to double the width of the sidewalks in front of its half block — from 5 feet to 10 feet wide.
AND it would be required to do all the accompanying utility work – gas and electric.
The result would be a 150-foot stretch of 10-foot-wide sidewalk, while the other 97 percent of the sidewalk on either side of Thomasville Road in Midtown remained 5 feet wide.
Oh, you might be thinking … how much does that cost?
The initial estimate obtained by Bradshaw was a whopping $150,000-plus and included grading, earthwork, curbing, demolition and much more. And that was before any utility work.
But things get even stranger.
You might be asking, where did 10 feet come from?
Good question. The ill-fated Midtown Placemaking project — eventually scuttled by FDOT after concerns about the devastating impact on affected businesses — only called for sidewalks to be widened to 6 feet on the east side of Thomasville Road (the Midtown Reader side) and 8 feet on the west side.
Why was 6 feet good enough for Blueprint, FDOT and the City of Tallahassee but now 10 feet was the new rule for Midtown Reader?
Bradshaw never got a clear answer to that question.
For Sally, the sidewalk demand was a non-starter given the cost, and the fact that walking traffic in midtown is extremely low — most customers come from other areas of the city, they drive, they need parking.
But the City had a counteroffer.
The sidewalk was the final indignity. But it wasn’t the first.
COMING NEXT: PART 2
The Rules Nobody Wrote Down: How being unaware of the City’s unwritten rulebook almost buried Midtown Reader before the sidewalk fight even began.