Tampa Town Then and Now

These days I spend my Saturday mornings riding a route that starts at Water Works Park, takes me through the University of Tampa to Platt Street, then eventually out the Bayshore to MacDill AFB, then back down the Bayshore to a ride all the fingers of Davis Island to Peter O’ Knight Airport, then down Channel Drive to Tampa General Hospital, and back again eventually to Water Works, about 30 miles.

This ride means a lot to me, as someone who was born in old St. Joseph’s Hospital on Morgan and 7th to a Spanish mother born in Ybor City who went on to attend the University of Tampa, with one grandfather who worked (and died) at Tampa’s shipyards during the war, with another grandfather who had a picture frame shop on Cass Street downtown who, with my dad, watched the Kress building go up, and trains regularly traverse Polk Street, with a father who worked for and retired from Tampa Electric after pumping gas at a Sunoco filling station at Magnolia and Swann before and after the war, and with my experience as a young man sitting in on board meetings at a downtown bank whose directors all had streets named after them.

While I remember these areas from my youth, watching the Jose Gaspar invade each year from the grounds of my dad’s power plant, Peter O’ Knight (thereafter Tampa Tribune and now apartments), motoring down the same channel I view from my bike in my dad’s tiny outboard, and having to occasionally and reluctantly go down to Tampa General for family health issues; more recently my environmental assessment work has given me the awesome opportunity to study many of these sites professionally back into the late 1800s.

I’ve been challenged and blessed to have worked on the initial environmental assessment of land including Water Works Park and Tampa Armature, done work on the before-its-time Civitas project that ran a course east on Scott Street to Nuccio Parkway, studied five city blocks downtown, including one across the street from my granddad’s old shop, studied the triangular Pinellas Saving and Loan building on Grand Central, and iconic buildings in Ybor City including Ybor Square. Even more recently I was fortunate enough to assess all the properties comprising the exciting new Midtown development.

It’s fascinating to study the old Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps to see what was there before, and to pour over old Burgert Brothers photographs of what things looked like way back when (many of these photos hang on my office walls).

I can safely say that Tampa has dramatically and emphatically changed, and mostly on my watch!