Oh Christmas Tree

A photograph of St. Petersburg's Christmas Tree going up in North Straub Park shortly after Thanksgiving this year, with the bay in the background:

Part of waterfront holiday decorations and celebrations that included a Glice skating rink.


Straub Park is named in honor of William L. Straub, the St. Petersburg Times editor who campaigned for public ownership of the waterfront. He endlessly promoted St. Petersburg and understood that an attractive waterfront would attract more tourists. Of the cities on the bay, with Tampa to the east, St. Petersburg to the west was the less industrial, the more reliant on tourist dollars. It was the "Sunshine City." In the 1910s and 1920s Straub pushed St. Petersburg's citizens and leaders to use urban planning and to invest public money in the environment to ensure the current and future prosperity of St. Petersburg and Pinellas County.

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Further reading:

St. Petersburg and the Florida Dream, 1888-1950, by Raymond Arsenault (University Press of Florida 1999)

Visions of Eden: Environmentalism, Urban Planning, and City Building in St. Petersburg, Florida, 1900-1995, by R. Bruce Stephenson (Ohio State University Press 1997)

Power

In 1955 Florida Power Corporation bought the northern part of Weedon Island and built a power plant there. The power plant property includes some of the prehistoric mounds, the former Weedon house site, and a 1930s movie studio. The power company used the movie studio as a warehouse until it burned in 1963. The power plant is now Progress Energy's Bartow Power Plant.

Here's a glimpse of the power plant through the mangroves along Gandy Boulevard:

If you were to take a few steps further towards the water and look to the east across Old Tampa Bay, you'd see the Interbay Peninsula, home to South Tampa, Port Tampa, and MacDill Air Force Base.

Squint a bit, and you'll see a very large airplane landing at MacDill AFB.

Today MacDill Air Force Base is home to the 6th Air Mobility Wing, U.S. Central Command, and the headquarters of the U.S. Special Operations Command, along with 51 other Mission Partners. Nearly seventy years ago it was a brand new base, training pilots for World War II. Base commander on December 7, 1941, was General Clarence Tinker, also known as the first Native American to become a Major General in the United States Army. Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma was named in his honor.

Weeden Island Preserve Fieldtrip

This week I took my class to the Weedon Island Preserve in St. Petersburg. The class is a seminar, an interdisciplinary overview of the Humanities with Florida as a unifying theme. My students are freshmen in the University Honors program at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg. This fieldtrip to Weedon Island was a chance to escape the classroom for an afternoon, and a chance to visit a place that is both a valuable natural resource and a valuable cultural resource. The Preserve is managed by Pinellas County Parks, and offers nature trails, interpretative exhibits, historic sites, Indian mounds, kayaking, birdwatching, educational programs, and more.

The design on the exterior of the museum is inspired by a prehistoric culture that flourished here a couple of thousand years ago, the Weeden Island culture, known for its elaborate pottery. This particular pattern would be Weeden Island Punctate, basically made by poking wet clay with the end of a reed or stem. The Weeden Island culture was found along the gulf coast from Tampa Bay northward and westward into southern Georgia and Alabama.

Jesse Fewkes of the Smithsonian Institution named the site and the culture in the 1920s when he excavated the site. He was also, unfortunately, responsible for a spelling error. Archaeologists refer to the Weeden Island culture and the Weeden Island site, and Weeden Island pottery. That's Weeden with three e's. But the name of the island is actually Weedon Island, with two e's and one o. Technically speaking, the island's name originally was Weedon's Island, with a possessive apostrophe s. In the 1890s the island was a wedding present to Blanche Henderson and Leslie Weedon, a Tampa physician. The couple and their family used the island as a weekend retreat. A twist to the story is that Leslie Weedon was the grandson of Frederick Weedon, known to historians as the doctor to Osceola while the Seminole leader was imprisioned in St. Augustine. When Osceola died, Dr. F. Weedon prepared his body for burial, but for some reason kept Osceola's head separate.

Further Reading: The Weedon Island Story (pdf)

International Coastal Cleanup

Saturday was the 2008 International Coastal Cleanup Day, organized by the Ocean Conservancy. Several local cleanups were coordinated by Keep Hillsborough County Beautiful, including one along Courtney Campbell Causeway in Tampa Bay.
















It was a beautiful morning to be picking up trash. My team found plenty of bottles, cigarette butts, and a dreidel, which got a mention in the local paper!
















Things we found that belonged there included a wasp nest and several horseshoe crab shells.

Ode to Odet and Those Who Came Before

In my mind it was a quiet day. Boys were throwing sticks, dogs were licking baby faces, parents were napping or cleaning up after lunch. An ordinary day.

Then the Spanish came.















Do you see them? Is that Panfilo de Narvaez, the man standing on the deck, eyes straining toward shore? If it is, you had better run and hide.

Now Philippe Park, then the Native American village of Tocobaga, this site on the shore of Safety Harbor was a sort of ground zero for the radical cultural and social changes that came along with Spanish exploration of La Florida in the 16th century. Each time I visit here, I look across the harbor toward Old Tampa Bay and wonder what it's like to have your way of life end.

Yet for all that, Philippe Park is a very pleasant place. It's big; there's room for everyone, with picnic shelters, a boat ramp, and great playgrounds for little and not-so-little kids. The oaks provide shade for you and shelter for frisky squirrels who have their beady eyes on your KFC. After dinner, the kids run up and down the old Indian mound. Where else in coastal Florida do they see a hill such as this? I suspect any child who tried this 500 years ago got a good clout on the ear.







































The park has a quirky history as well as a prehistory. In the 1840s, when settlement was just starting around here, a man named Odet Philippe picked this spot to be his homestead. Or Count Odet Philippe, or Dr. Odet Philippe -- he was a colorful man with a past, who claimed to be French royalty and a friend of Napoleon Bonaparte. If all the stories were true, he was over 100 years old when he died here. But no matter -- he was a true Floridian, who started a new life, reinvented himself, and stuck it out in the end. He certainly had his share of adventures here -- an exerpt from an interpretive sign at the park:















"Originally, this mound was rectangular in shape, but a tremendous hurricane in 1848 washed away approximately 1/3 of the mound. At that time, Odet Philippe used the mound to save his family from the tidal surge."


Just another typical day at the park.

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For more information or directions and events, visit Pinellas County's website for Philippe Park.

Go figure... Go Rays!

Friday night was a special night for the Tampa Bay (Devil) Rays. Their win over the Baltimore Orioles guaranteed the Rays a winning season, the first in the franchise's history.
















The Rays play at Tropicana Field, an air-conditioned indoor stadium. Not particularly romantic or glamorous, but immensely practical for Florida summers.

Anna Maria Island City Pier

In the early 1890s, George Emerson Bean of Connecticut set up a homestead on the northern end of Anna Maria Island, looking across salt water to Egmont Key, at the mouth of Tampa Bay. In 1911 George's son George started the Anna Maria Beach Company along with John Roser (more about him later), beginning commercial development of the island. One of the first steps was to build a city pier on the bay side of the island, where excursion steamers from Tampa could unload passengers.

The City Pier is still a popular spot for tourists, day trippers, and local fishermen.

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Further Reading

Visiting Small-Town Florida (Revised Edition) by Bruce Hunt (Pineapple Press, 2003)

A Historical Geography of Southwest Florida Waterways: Volume One, Anna Maria Sound to Lemon Bay (Sea Grant Florida, 2000)

Sunshine Skyway

Here we are, heading south again, over the Sunshine Skyway Bridge.















This is the world's longest cable stayed concrete bridge, built in 1987. The cables are painted yellow and lit at night, but right now they are in the middle of a repainting project.

Going up . . .































. . . and down.

















This bridge replaced the original 1950s Sunshine Skyway Bridge, which was hit by a freighter during a 1980 storm. A section of the bridge fell into the water, killing 35 people. The new bridge design incorporated features to prevent that from happening again. Still, it's not entirely comforting to look out the window and see parts of the original span that have been turned into fishing piers. Here's the north pier:














On the plus side, the piers are very popular with fishermen.

The bridge is so high because it crosses Tampa Bay, and all the ships (the tankers, the cargo ships, the cruise ships) have to pass underneath to reach the Port of Tampa and Port Manatee. The bridge also connects St. Petersburg and Bradenton/Sarasota, saving an hour or more of drive time around the bay. Before the bridge, there was the Bee Line Ferry. The Sunshine Skyway Bridge (officially named the Bob Graham Sunshine Skyway Bridge in 2005) is part of Interstate-275, and there is a one dollar toll.