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Bigger isn't what made Bayshore Beautiful
© St. Petersburg Times As I drove up a street in Bayshore Beautiful, a block west of where I used to live, I felt like I was driving through a mountain pass, there were so many big, new houses on small lots on both sides of the street. When the first big, new house went up in that block, it looked like it belonged to the lord of the manor and the small houses to serfs. More and more small houses got torn down, and at some point, the big houses outnumbered them. Today, there are 13 new, big houses to six old small houses. My favorite cottage, if you can call a $300,000-plus house a cottage, had been torn down, I thought, but when I circled around again I saw it was still there, so dwarfed that I'd missed it. A white-frame almost-bungalow with a pristine front lawn, it used to be the largest and most noticeable house on the block. The corner lot on the block, a huge lot with a smallish house, used to be overgrown with green trees, hedges, vines -- it looked like the cover of a "Green Mansions" paperback I once owned. There are now three bulky new houses on that lot. The bower of green that was the view from my front porch, especially dramatic in a thunderstorm, is gone. Three years ago, when there were only a few new houses in that block, I talked to an architect about this trend. I was told the big, new houses are a good thing, because they build up the city's tax base. I was also told cities change. I know that, but presumably we want them to change for the better. Neighborhoods such as Hyde Park are immune to change, protected by their designation as historic districts. But in most of South Tampa there is no protection. Yet the charm of neighborhoods like Beach Park and Palma Ceia, and so many others, is in the older houses, whether they're 1930s Mediterranean Revival mansions or 1,200-square-foot Spanish bungalows or mid century ranches that are coming back into style. These houses -- and their surrounding trees -- give us a sense of the history of how the city grew up. We can see our past just by driving down a street. Or we could. We're losing it, fast. The Bayshore Beautiful block that existed only a few years ago is almost gone, its bits of old Florida charm wedged in between the big new houses that could be on any street in any new suburb anywhere. Drive around; just when you think all the tear-downs have already happened, you see another cleared lot, evidence of one more house bulldozed. A friend of mine told me that after they sold their house on Davis Islands, it was torn down. When the grown kids came to visit in their new, smaller house on the Islands, initially, it felt awkward. So they showed some old home movies, and that seemed to help. "In our minds, the house is still there, just as it always was," she said, smiling. Several years ago, I went to Illinois to search for the places where my mother had grown up and lived as a young woman. Every apartment building and house was still there, all the way back to the earliest address I could find, in 1927. The blocks, even the neighborhoods, were physically very much the same. Different people lived there, but it wasn't difficult to imagine my mother and her friends, instead of the Middle Eastern children, playing in that South Chicago street. Seeing the same houses, the same streets, gave me a tremendous sense of connection with the past. The only building that was gone was the 1940s ranch house in the suburbs where we moved when I was in kindergarten. The owner-contractor had gutted it and was building a new, bigger house. He invited us in and showed us where his two-head plexiglass shower and his Jacuzzi would be. Yet the rest of block was unchanged. I looked out the front window of his new house, and the view was very much the same as it was when I was 6. -- Sandra Thompson is a writer living in Tampa. She can be reached at Tampa@sptimes.com. City Life appears on Saturday.
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
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Times columns today From the Times Metro desk |
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