Sundries

From other blogs:

Gulfstream Park Opens, 1944 (Colin's Ghost) History of the horse racing track at Gulfstream Park

Frostproof (The South Florida Watershed Journal) The Floridian winter wonderland

Bites of the Alligator (The Keeper's Blog) A steamboat wreck on the St. Johns River

Ringling's Isles (Architecture Research) Development of St. Armand's Key

From newspapers:

"Busch Gardens to end 50-year flow of free beer" St. Petersburg Times, January 6, 2009

"Old Pinellas school could become teacher housing " St. Petersburg Times, November 12, 2008

"Couple buys 80-year-old penthouse of Babe Ruth" St. Petersburg Times, January 2, 2009

"Citrus grove grew with owner's passion " St. Petersburg Times, January 2, 2009

Peter O. Knight Airport on Davis Islands

One fine evening a week or so ago, I found myself on Davis Islands. So I drove down to the southern tip of the island, where it isn't so much that it's picturesque, as there's always something to see there.


Davis Islands (most people say Davis Island, but it is actually more than one piece of land completely surrounded by water. It's not a big deal whichever version you use.) is a Tampa neighborhood out in Hillsborough Bay. This place started out as a couple of grassy, muddy islands, cleverly named Big and Little Grassy Islands. Then in the 1920s David P. Davis turned these into a Florida Boom Time development, with elaborate Mediterranean Revival buildings and houses. Unfortunately for Davis, the Florida Boom ended, and he found himself in deep, dark financial waters. Soon, he sadly ended up in actual waters, disappearing from a luxury yacht during a Trans-Atlantic voyage.

(History and old photographs of Davis Islands are available on the Davis Islands Civic Association website.)

In the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration built an airport at the southern end of Davis Islands. The airport was named after Peter O. Knight, a prominent Tampa lawyer, who was also very involved with local businesses, most notably the Tampa Electric Company. It was through the electric company that Knight convinced Stone & Webster to invest in Davis Islands when David P. Davis was struggling in the 1920s. The airport included a seaplane basin. After World War II, Drew Field (which had been an Army Air Force training base during the war) became Tampa's new international airport. Peter O. Knight Airport's runways were too short for the newer, larger passenger planes, so it was used by private planes and helicopters.

The airport's original administration building was torn down in the 1960s, and replaced by the current building. Although seaplanes aren't quite as popular anymore, the basin is still there at Davis Islands, only now it's a marina and home to the Davis Island Yacht Club. It's also the location of an extremely popular dog park, which includes a beach for dogs to splash in the bay as cruise ships and tankers glide by on the Port of Tampa's shipping channel.

Renewing West Tampa

This weekend was the First Annual Renew Tampa event, highlighting connections between historic preservation and environmental conservation. Part of Renew Tampa was a two-day schedule of speakers and an expo hall of architects and builders, which was held at the historic Berriman-Morgan cigar factory in Tampa (click here for Tampa Tribune's special report on the Berriman Morgan factory, including an interesting interactive graphic of the building and its history). The factory is currently being renovated by Jammal Engineering.

In past decades, after cigars were no longer made within its walls, the Berriman-Morgan factory stood empty. Interstate 275 cut the factory off from the rest of West Tampa, and today the interstate is being widened, bringing the highway right up to the factory lot.

Cigar factories are not heavy industrial sites, and so neighborhoods grew up around them, with houses immediately across the street. It was Old Urbanism, with home, work, school, and stores all within walking distance. Or if not, you could hop on a streetcar to get there. Looking out the windows of the Berriman-Morgan factory, a few remnants of this pattern of development can be seen.

After the event, I drove home, cutting through West Tampa on Howard Avenue. As I passed by Baker & Co., I stopped and turned around and went back. It's an antique / nostalgic general store in a restored historic brick building. They have a tea room for group events, and you can buy rose-scented soap, nickel candy, or bleacher seats from Wrigley Field.

Behind the store is this funny little house, one of a string of similar funny little houses on the block. This is a common pattern in West Tampa, where the entire neighborhood wasn't built at one time by one developer like suburbs are today, but where a small developer or single landowner owned a few city lots and built a few houses using the same design. These then generated rental income, an investment.

Going back to the store's parking lot, this is what you see:

This is the Centro Espanol de West Tampa, built as a branch of the El Centro Espanol in Ybor City, a social club and mutual aid society for Spanish immigrants in Tampa. In recent years, the fate of the Centro Espanol de West Tampa building has been up in the air, but today it is the temporary home of the Tampa Museum of Art. The museum itself has been in the news a good bit, but the short end of it is that the collections are being housed here while a new museum building is being built downtown.

I stopped in, but I hadn't realized the museum closed at 4 on a Saturday. I apologized to the woman at the desk for coming in 10 minutes before closing. That's fine she said, it'll only take you five minutes to go through the gallery anyhow. Oh-kay....

So I went ahead to the gallery, which is around a post and through what looks like a tiled cafeteria. There's lots of white. And the exhibit was mostly pen and ink or charcoal, just occasional color. But it was pretty good, what there was.

Websites showing renovation of Centro Espanol de West Tampa:

windows

molding and exterior trimwork

Florida News

"Pirates...extremists all" (Fort Myers Florida Weekly, December 6, 2007)

"Monday Chat with Willy Johns: Seminole tribe historian looks toward future" (TCPalm, December 2, 2007)

"McCarty House fire was set by someone, but not sure if intentional" (TCPalm, December 5, 2007)

"Former local developer has big plans for a Florida ranch" (Virginian Pilot, December 5, 2007)

"1920s and '30s Saw the Start of Many Local Traditions" (High school football in Lakeland, The Ledger, November 29, 2007)

"America's first Christmas was right here" (Tallahassee Democrat, December 1, 2007)

"Challenging the Citrus Status Quo" (The Ledger, December 3, 2007)

"Hope floats for revamping historic vessel: The Schooner Western Union Preservation Society is holding a festival Sunday to raise funds to restore the aging wooden boat with a rich history." (Miami Herald, December 1, 2007)

"Work is nearly done at Dubsdread golf course in Orlando" (Orlando Sentinel, December 2, 2007)

"Historic School Falls But Memories Rise" (Meachem Alternative School in Tampa's Central Park Village, Tampa Tribune, December 1, 2007)

Clermont's Citrus Tower

We stayed in Clermont for awhile this summer, so one afternoon we visited the Citrus Tower on Highway 27. The 226-foot tall tower was built in 1956, when it provided tourists with panoramic views of citrus groves flowing over rolling hills. Freezes in the 1980s killed many of the trees, and now the tower provides tourists with panoramic views of subdivisions. But it is still an interesting place, and a unique perspective.

There are stores and a restaurant at the base of the tower. To go up to the top, you must buy a ticket in the gift shop. The elevator entrance is a single door, behind the counter. Once at the top, painted signs explain which direction you are looking, and how far it is to points of interest. For kids, or the kid inside, there is a slot to drop a coin and listen as it falls all the way back down the tower.

The Citrus Tower's website has more information and photographs of the tower being built. In the photographs below, you may notice a one of a white columned building with a scale model of Mount Rushmore in the parking lot. That's the Presidents Hall of Fame.

Prize Property

A relic of my husband's youth in Miami, dredged from the bottom of the family game closet: Prize Property, the 1974 Milton Bradley land development board game. The object: "to develop wastelands into prize properties."

At the start of the game, the board is covered with overlays showing the undeveloped land, brown and in places, on fire. Old brick factories and farm buildings stand abandoned, gaping holes in their roofs. These overlays are removed as players "improve" their property, revealing lush green sites where casinos and resort hotels may be built.

To win, you must be the first to construct all nine of your resort buildings. On the waterfront, you build a tennis & swim club, a marina, and camp grounds. In the middle tier, you build a golf course, a health spa, and a dude ranch. And finally, you build a hotel, a casino, and a ski lodge. Nope, no affordable housing for the people who run your properties, but the little buildings sure are cute.

The money is counted in the millions, and players must navigate town meetings; legal actions are settled by drawing colored marbles from a plastic gavel. Periodically, a marina is flooded or a camp ground burns.

Aside from creative genius of the game's design, it's actually pretty dull to play and it comes in a large awkward box. But we keep it around because it's just so..., well, they just don't make them like this any more.

New Florida Books

Michael Gannon's History of Florida in 40 Minutes (hardcover + cd, University Press of Florida, $24.95)

If you like to judge books by their cover, you'll be glad to know this one is exactly what it claims. Eminent Florida historian Michael Gannon summarizes Florida's past into ten key populations, ~70 widely spaced pages of text, and a 40-minute CD (included with the book). Good for commuters, a quick refresher for long-time residents, or an introduction for people who just moved here.


Florida's Living Beaches: A Guide for the Curious Beachcomber (Blair and Dawn Witherington, softcover, 326 pages with index, Pineapple Press, $21.95)

There you are at the beach, looking for shells, and you find them, along with lots of other neat (or gross) things. But what exactly are your treasures? Even if you do remember to pack the nature guides in the beach bag, how many different books would you need to lug out there to identify the shells, the birds, the fish, the everything. Now it's all in one tidy book, with clear color photos and text, from chicken liver sponges to sea purse beans.


Faces on the Frontier: Florida Surveyors and Developers in the 19th Century (Joe Knetsch, softcover, 214 pages with index, The Florida Historical Society Press, $23.95)

This book is a collection of 15 essays and articles about the men who mapped the Florida wilderness. In it you will meet Robert Butler (who married Andrew Jackson's wife's niece, and was the first Surveyor General of Florida), John Wescott (who fought to have money from sales of state lands -- every Section 16 -- put into a school fund), John Jackson (who put Tampa on a map), and Albert W. Gilchrist (who struggled to survey the mangove coast of Sanibel Island years before he became Governor).


Southern Comforts: Rooted in a Florida Place (Sudye Cauthen, hardcover, 192 pages, Center for American Places, $29.95)

Blending memoir, local history, family stories, and ancient cultures, Sudye Cauthen shows us the Alachua as she experiences the place. This book isn't in the stores yet, but you can order it online. Last week at the Florida Historical Society meeting, I heard her read a selection from the book, in which she wove memories of a beloved aunt with a description of archaeologists unearthing burials at a long-forgotten Spanish mission. I'm very much looking forward to reading Southern Comforts from cover to cover.

Today's News Headline

Today's Story

"Developer Sues Activitsts for Fighting 42-Story Condo Next to Stranahan House" (South Florida Sun-Sentinel, May 15, 2007)


Bloggers React

"Lawsuit Slappy" (The Daily Pulp)
"Developer Vs. Conservation Activists" (Stuck on the Palmetto)
"Slapp Happy? Related Group v. Stranahan House" (Randazza's Academic [In]Sanity)

Relevant Links

Stranahan House
Icon Las Olas
Book Review: The Stranahans of Fort Lauderdale: A Pioneer Family of New River