Signs of a big city creep into Tampa

THOMPSON E-mail: Click here

© St. Petersburg Times
published April 13, 2002

Saturday at noon in Pane Rustica on S MacDill Avenue, a group of elderly women had pushed two round tables together and were eating lunch and kibitzing alongside the trendy types waiting in line to order.

Next door at Beef O'Brady's, through the floor-to-ceiling doors open to the sidewalk, you could see a children's birthday party taking place, as witnessed by the cake and presents and balloons.

It struck me as incongruous at first, like the women next door whom you would expect to see in a more ladies-who-lunch place. But in this window of opportunity between what we take as winter and what no one would dispute is summer, everyone is out somewhere. And not necessarily where it is customary to see them.

On Friday night, when the Latin band at Pipo's on Davis Islands started playing at 7:30 p.m., the outdoor dance floor was taken over not by Tampa's older Spanish crowd but by little kids who jumped and boogied while their parents finished bottles of sangria. Down Davis Boulevard, people at sidewalk tables at Estellas ate enchiladas and drank margaritas, serenaded by mariachis.

On Saturday night at International Plaza, Bay Street, which is not a real street but the outdoor space at the mall where most of the restaurants and bars are clustered, was hopping. Outside tables at Starbucks were full. So was the outdoor bar at the new Blue Martini. Sidewalk tables at Prezzo, Gallery Eclectic Bistro and Profusion were likely to be taken, too.

Friday afternoon, Starbucks on Howard was overflowing with their crowd of mostly young people congregating under the tall oaks wisely left standing by the developer who took over this property a couple years ago.

That was just last week.

On weekday mornings at Panera on N Dale Mabry, people sit and read the newspaper while munching cinnamon crunch bagels, just as if this location were in a real city and not a rest stop on a busy highway.

At Panera on Westshore Boulevard on a weekday afternoon, you'll find people conducting business meetings, laptops and papers scattered over the table tops. In late morning, before the lunch rush, in places like Panera you see new mothers with babies -- sometimes only weeks old -- not mothers meeting friends, but alone, yet out of the house with the kid for a quick salad.

The cafes at Borders on both Dale Mabrys teem with people reading, studying, writing, talking, even painting -- and, during office hours, making calls on their cell phones and jotting notes into their planners.

It seems to me a place becomes more of a city when people leave their houses and venture into public places to live their lives.

In Tampa, that's only recently become possible, and not all at once. But it has made a major change in how we live.

The arrival of Starbucks and Panera and, before that, the mega-bookstores with their cafes, means nobody needs ever to spend a morning or lunch hour or afternoon or evening at home. Without making plans, that is, just deciding at the spur of the moment to get up and get out and see other people.

Now there are rumors a Starbucks is to open on Bay to Bay less than five minutes from my house. This would have been big news a couple years ago, cause for rejoicing even. But there are already two Starbucks within five minutes of my house; the newer one, on Dale Mabry, I haven't even gone to.

And probably never will.

Which, I guess, is another measure of a big city: the places you don't have to go to.

-- Sandra Thompson is a writer living in Tampa. She can be reached at tampa@sptimes.com. City Life appears on Saturday.

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