No Place Like Home: The thrill's no longer gone

[Times photo: Cherie Diez] Looking for a quick -- and cheap -- diversion this summer? Strap down the kids and take a ride on Third Street S.

By JEANNE MALMGREN, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published June 17, 2002

The drive down one St. Petersburg street has character once more. Punctuating the ho-hum commute with a second of carnival ride breathlessness, Thrill Hill is working its magic again.

ST. PETERSBURG -- For months the thrill was gone. With road construction on Third Street S, only one lane of the city's best-known narrow bridge was open. You had to creep slowly over the hump.

No flip-flop in the stomach. No surge of adrenaline.

Now the roadwork is finished, and Thrill Hill again is entertaining kids in backseats.

Probably nowhere else would driving over a small rise in the road -- an eyebrow of a bridge over a brackish creek -- qualify as a thrill. But this is flat Florida, and we're starved for elevation.

Thrill Hill has been thrilling since 1911, when trolleys first rumbled over the brick road, daring riders who were hanging off the back for extra kicks.

Generations of St. Petersburg teens learned how to "do" the hill: Pack Dad's sedan full of whooping friends and hit the rise hard enough to put air between the tires and the asphalt.

That was before the fatal head-on accidents and the blinking amber caution light. Now drivers get a finger-wagging from 25 mph speed-limit signs and big S-L-O-W letters on the asphalt.

At 25 mph, the thrill is small, like the minirise out of your seat as a horse canters. Your neck elongates, your intestines flutter. You can't see what's on the other side of the hill. Is the road still there?

Then you fall back to earth. The road flattens. You glance at the speedometer. Some thrills are better than cheap. They're free.

- Times staff writer JEANNE MALMGREN

Thrill Hill is on Third Street S, just south of 15th Avenue S. "No Place Like Home" highlights underappreciated people, places, things and experiences in the Tampa Bay area.

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