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Stretching the reach of Midtown
By BRYAN GILMER, Times Staff Writer ST. PETERSBURG -- Jennifer Hogge lives on Fourth Avenue N, in a gentrified neighborhood of well-kept lawns and freshly painted bungalows. Officially, it's Historic Kenwood. But city officials wanted to make it part of Midtown, traditionally defined as southern central St. Petersburg. Hogge doesn't know what the two areas have in common. "When you think of the south side, where the riots were, that's a depressed area," said Hogge, 43, who works in an antiques store. "And this isn't." "Midtown," between Fourth and 34th streets and Second Avenue N and 30th Avenue S, was marked for special city attention after racial unrest in 1996.
Moving the northern boundary to Fifth Avenue N to include Hogge's house would add avenues with higher incomes and property values and lower unemployment. Deputy Mayor Goliath Davis III said residents requested the change at community meetings he led. But the Historic Kenwood neighborhood association' president, Sandy Ewing, was surprised to hear the idea. "I haven't heard anything about that. That's amazing. Oh my gosh," he said, before declining to comment further and saying he would call City Hall. Later, Mayor Rick Baker said: "I don't know that anything has been proposed. I think Go would agree that he would only want the boundaries expanded at the request of the neighborhoods." Naming and defining "Midtown" is, maybe more than ever, a tricky political proposition. Former Mayor David Fischer outlined the "Challenge Area" in 1996. Civil unrest erupted in the area after a police officer fatally shot a black driver during a traffic stop. In 2000, Fischer acknowledged he had come nowhere close to his lofty Challenge goals. He did not run for re-election.
Baker was elected after he, too, promised economic development in the area. He says he wants a "seamless city," where no part of town seems poor and hopeless. Baker didn't hold a community contest or research history to come up with "Midtown." He made it up. "It's descriptive but not critical," Baker said. "It doesn't delineate it as a problem area, it just delineates it geographically. It seems to have been widely received. "During the campaign, I had heard a fair amount of criticism, frankly, of the Challenge Area name. People felt like they were being labeled as a challenged area. And we've talked to some businesses in the past who said that may not be the best name for an area you are trying to bring business into."
But Baker's and Davis' decision to rename the area and the idea of stretching its borders infuriate some Midtown residents. Baker has kept the line Fischer drew around poor communities like Bartlett Park, Melrose-Mercy and Campbell Park, places where blacks were forced to live during segregation. "During slavery, each owner had his own name for his plantation, and slaves took on that name," said Maria Scruggs-Weston, a black resident of the Thirteenth Street Heights neighborhood and an opponent Baker defeated in the mayoral primary. "We've been the Enterprise Zone, the Front Porch community, the Weed and Seed community and the Challenge -- all these things that don't mean anything to African-Americans. It's like, "This is my time, so let me be able to attach my successes to something in the African-American community.' " Childs Park, a sprawling neighborhood that has struggled with violent crime, is another community that the city would like to make part of Midtown. Armanda Lampley, who heads the Childs Park Neighborhood Association, supports the idea. "I'm open to any improvements in the area, and if being a part of Midtown is going to help that happen, I'm for it," Lampley said. Just west of the current Midtown area, Childs Park is packed with working-class households with two-income earners. The mostly black community is less poor than the current version of Midtown. If Baker approves the change, the benefit will be mutual. Taking the new areas together with the former Challenge Area would improve Midtown's economic profile. Data from market research firm Claritas Inc. show estimated median household incomes for most sections of the current Midtown range from $7,311 to $21,357.
Childs Park has many sections with median household incomes of $21,357 to $33,182. Several sections fall into the $33,182 to $39,500 range. Historic Kenwood is even more prosperous, with some sections having median incomes ranging from $39,500 to $62,727. The median value of single-family homes is also higher in both neighborhoods than it is in Midtown today, county public records show. In Fischer's Challenge Area, the median single-family home is assessed at $39,000. In Childs Park, $46,300. In the suggested section of Historic Kenwood, $54,900. An expanded Midtown would seem less poor and be more attractive to businesses. Baker and Davis, meanwhile, could recruit a company to the more marketable areas and still brag of bringing business to Midtown. But Davis said he "never considered that" when he recommended stretching the boundary. Residents at his focus groups suggested the change, he repeated. He just agreed it was a good idea. Childs Park and Historic Kenwood are both transitional neighborhoods, models for the core Midtown neighborhoods, Davis said. To the St. Petersburg Area Chamber of Commerce, the boundaries aren't as important as the city's commitment to fixing an area that has long hurt the city's image. "The mayor has said, seemingly, this is the one spot that has been ignored, and he's going to address it," executive director Russ Sloan said. "A blister if left unattended on your toe can wind up killing you." Many Midtown residents aren't angry; they're cynical. They shrug off a new name or boundary for their part of the city, where unemployment remains more than double that of the rest of the city at 7 percent. The E Z Laundromat on 18th Ave. S stands a few blocks from where the 1996 violence began. Duct tape holds together the dryers' plastic windows. L. "Dog" Purson drops a quarter into a dryer. The timer ticks off minutes, but the machine won't turn. "Everybody else still refers to it as south side St. Pete," Purson responds when asked what he thinks of the Midtown name. "If that's what they want to call it, it doesn't change anything does it?" -- Times researcher Barbara Oliver contributed to this story.
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