There's a What?

Today the Tribune reported that the police raided a grow house in Tampa. But that's not what caught my eye. It was that the grow house was hidden in an old Army Air Corps underground ammunition bunker, which is now evidently part of somebody's yard!

The house is in the Drew Park neighborhood, east of the airport and west of the stadium. During World War II, Drew Park was part of Drew Field, an Army Air Corps training base.

Every house has a story. Some are more eventful than others.

Hot War to Hot Dogs

Just to the east of Busch Gardens' parking lot in Tampa stands Mel's Hot Dogs, since 1973. The restaurant also happens to be in the last remaining building from the World War II training base, Henderson Field. The former Army air field land is now part of Busch Gardens, a brewery, and the University of South Florida. Traces of the runways can still be found, and in 2000, construction crews at the university found a rusty practice bomb.

Florida in Life

Google recently added a way to search old Life magazine photographs: Life photo archives.

Some examples of Florida photographs found this way. . . .

Soldiers at mailcall outside the Breakwater Hotel, Miami Beach, 1942

Dwight D. Eisenhower's arrival in Key West in a lemon-colored Cadillac, December 1955

Upside-down house, 1960

Nixon and the balloon drop, GOP Convention, Miami Beach, 1968

Architect Eliot Noyes and interior decorator Kathryn Smallen on terrace of bubble house at Hobe Sound, Florida, 1954

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.

Miami's Bayfront Park

Like many other coastal cities, Miami is located at the confluence of a river and the ocean, but the buildings can overwhelm the water. Downtown Miami does have a waterfront park, although US 1, Biscayne Boulevard, and the Metromover form a barrier between the buildings and the green space.

Bayfront Park offers quite the assortment of entertainment options, from open-air ampitheaters to trapzee lessons and hot-air balloon rides.

Bayfront Park has had a long history as a public space, all the way back to the 1920s. But it's been a tumultous past, with numerous reinventions. The most recent design is by Isamu Noguchi, dating to the 1980s. His scuptures dot the park, including one titled Slide Mantra that people obviously have been sliding down.

Dade County's World War II memorial is also located in Bayfront Park.

Clearwater Marine Aquarium

Clearwater Marine Aquarium, just over the Memorial Causeway Bridge (shown in the photo below, completed in 2005) from the mainland, is not as glossy as SeaWorld or the Florida Aquarium. The facility was converted from a sewage treatment plant in the 1970s, and that along with the large amounts of salt water and sea life contained within its concrete walls give it somewhat of a utilitarian air. The point of visiting here is to learn about sea life, not to admire architecture, although that does come into the story later on). The Aquarium's mission is to rescue marine animals, rehabilitate them, and release them back into their natural environments. Some animals cannot be returned to the wild because of injuries sustained, and they stay at the aquarium, becoming educational ambassadors. On the Aquarium's most famous residents is Winter, a young bottlenose dolphin who became entangled in a rope at a young age. The rope cut off the bolld supply to her tail. Now without a tail, she cannot swim as well as other dolphins. She captured national media attention when she received a prosthetic tail.

On a recent visit to the Clearwater Marine Aquarium, I did catch a glimpse of Winter, as well as several sea turtles, stingrays, sharks, and a sea otter. We also went on the aquarium's two-hour boat tour of Clearwater Bay, a nice trip for families, visitors, and all age groups. The trip is on a pontoon boat, with schedules stops to raise a crab trab and do some shelling on a spoil island. A couple of kids on the boat found sea urchins (reddish things in photo below), which they shared with the rest of the group. The tour guides/educators also run a seine net out, sampling underrwater life at different points in the bay. Creatures we all got to see included grunts, sea squirts, spider crabs, arrow crabs, tiny blue crabs, and bigger blue crabs. At one point a pod of six dolphins -- several of which were just youngsters -- lept beside the boat.

Along the way down the Intracoastal Waterway, the captain pointed out several houses on the shore, including Hulk Hogan's Swiss chalet-style mansion. Now, it's probably not a surprise to any of you, but I'm kind of a history geek, and I was a lot more interested in another house the captain mentioned.

This is Spottis Woode, sometimes called Spotswood, Donald Roebling's waterfront estate. The captain mentioned that Donald Roebling was the grandson of the man who built the Brooklyn Bridge, but Donald is noteworthy based on his own acheivements.

In 1930, Donald Roebling bought this parcel of land in Clearwater, naming it honor of his finacee, Miss Spottiswoode. Roebling built a fabulous Tudor-style mansion, then added a machine shop to the estate. After the 1928 Lake Okeechobee hurricane, Roebling saw first hand how difficult rescue efforts had been. In his machine shop, he built the first prototypes of the Roebling Alligator, an amphibious tractor or tank. He repeated tried to get the military interested in his invention, but unsuccessfully so until the Alligator was featured in a 1937 issue of Life magazine. By 1940, Roebling was suppling the vehicles to the Marine Corps. The Alligator played an important role in the Pacific Theater during World War II, after being testing on the beaches of Clearwater Bay and the Gulf of Mexico.

For more information about Donald Roebling and the Roebling Alligator:

"Roebling's Amphibian The Origin Of The Assault Amphibian," by Richard W. Roan

"The Alligator Amphibian: A Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark" (from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, a pdf file, includes photographs)

SS American Victory

The SS American Victory is docked in Tampa's Channelside District, between the Florida Aquarium and the cruise ship terminal.

SS American Victory is a World War II Merchant Marine Victory ship, now serving as a maritime museum. Although this particular ship was built in California, it is an effective reminder of the many, many ships built in Tampa during the war at the docks visible from the American Victory's decks.

Garrison Channel, looking west toward downtown to the right -- Harbor Island to the left, Tampa General Hospital on Davis Islands straight ahead.

Ybor Channel (part of the Port of Tampa, looking north toward Ybor City). When the Ybor Estuary was dredged in the early twentieth century, creating the channel, the Port of Tampa drew commercial shipping away from the Hillsborough River. It is now the largest port in Florida.